Suggested Readings in Atheism, Science and Critical Thinking

… always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear — 1 Peter 3:15 (NKJV)

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For those who are questioning their faith in religion or are looking for answers about God, the Bible or the historicity of Jesus, below is a personal list of books that I highly recommend for exploring these topics further. Every suggested reading list is different, but the books below helped me at various points along the way to unravel the many layers of theology and biblical teaching and ultimately, to answer the following questions:

  • What are the reasons for believing in God or following Christianity? The Bible, in 1 Peter, charges believers with being able to understand and articulate to others why they believe. I tried to do this with an open mind in a sincere and authentic quest for the truth, or the closest that I could get to it, and ultimately, I could not find any reasons to believe other than wanting it to be true.
  • How reliable is the New Testament? Since none of the writers in the New Testament were physically present when they wrote down the comings and goings of Christ — Mark, the first gospel in the New Testament canon is thought to have been written in 70 A.D., and earlier works on which Mark is based have been lost to history — are they to be believed? Since research in psychology tells us that even first-person accounts of events are not reliable, how are we to reconcile gospel accounts that were written three or four decades after the death of Jesus?
  • Did Jesus exist, and did he say and do what the Bible claims he did?
  • How can we know what is true? Why does knowing what is actually true matter?
  • And a question that isn’t asked enough, but is a very important one: If a person concludes that there is no god and humankind is slowly moving away from religion, where do we then find our comfort, our strength and our inspiration? Art? Music? Literature? Nature? Other people? Much like homosexuals who come out of the closet, former Christians who no longer believe — which is, much like being gay, not a choice — often face an uphill battle dealing with, not just, in some cases, losing disappointed family and friends, but existential questions about how to move forward in a universe that is governed solely by the laws of nature and not by a benevolent guiding hand. Where do we find our peace? Joy? Hope? How do we face mortality? Oftentimes, belief is the comforting position, and when you leave the faith, it can feel like the bottom has dropped out and you’re now falling into the abyss. But it gets easier, and I hope anyone who may be struggling with these issues finds some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in their feelings. Many of us have been there. If you would like to talk anonymously or otherwise about your situation, I’m here. I can be reached at styron @ hotmail.com (remove spaces).

I have included a few theological works in this list because I think it’s important to have a balanced perspective, and it can be quite a jarring experience after you wake up to realize just how unconvincing, fallacious and logically bankrupt many of the apologetic arguments are.

  • The Portable Atheist” by Christopher Hitchens — A survey of writings by atheists and freethinkers throughout history. This book alone is a rich source to find other writings and authors on the subject.
  • The End of Faith” by Sam Harris — In my mind, one of the seminal disavowals and excoriations of religion. Harris’ logic is impenetrable.
  • Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris — A short and concise open letter to Christians about the suffering that has been heaped on mankind by religion or policies of the evangelical right in America. It also addresses many arguments put forth by Christians to support the faith. As Harris said in the book, “In ‘Letter to a Christian Nation,’ I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretension of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
  • The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins — Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist with a crisp and clear writing style that often includes humor. One of his main arguments is that people do not need religion to be good and that people who believe in their religion without evidence, and in fact, with strong evidence against their faith, can properly be called deluded: “… when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”
  • The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins — This is a good primer for studies in evolution. Dawkins does a great job of writing about the beauty and simplicity of evolution by natural selection, and he conveys his personal sense of scientific wonder about the gradual process by which complex species evolved from simple organisms by slow degrees over millions of years. Dawkins also has a very clear style, and he makes understanding scientific principles, well, understandable for lay people.
  • God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” by Christopher Hitchens — In my view, Hitchens was one of the most eloquent, well-read writers and speakers of my generation or any other. “So when I say as the subtitle of my book that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. We must be afraid. We must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of the sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship, and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil.”
  • Godless” by Dan Barker — Barker is a former pastor who makes the case in detail why he could not believe anymore, with many examples from the Bible.
  • Why I Became an Atheist” by John Loftus — Loftus is another former pastor whose chapter called “The Outsider Test for Faith” is one of the most compelling ideas I have read. Essentially, it is a challenge for believers to apply the same skepticism to their own faith as they apply to different religions.
  • Why I Am Not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell
  • The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” by John Dominic Crossan — This is an important resource for those looking into the claims of the New Testament and might be wrestling with whether Jesus said what the Bible says that he did. Crossan goes line-by-line through the sayings of Jesus in the four gospels and weighs them, based on collaboration with other scholars, on how authentic they seem to be. He has a scale for the verses from least authentic to most authentic. Mark proves to be the earliest, and thus, least embellished of the gospels, while John is the most embellished.
  • The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” by Carl Sagan”
  • Basic Writings of Existentialism” — Contains a selection of writings from de Beauvoir, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and others, and is a good starting place for nonbelievers who have just left the faith and are wondering, “What now?”
  • Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles — These last two are literary analyses of the old and new testaments. They evaluate the Bible as if God and Jesus are characters in a novel. From the perspective, they are fascinating reads.

Other recommendations

  • Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis — I read these Lewis works as I was questioning faith and found them to be well-written and thought-provoking. In hindsight as I revisited them after deconverting and didn’t find them terribly convincing, but since he is considered one of the greatest writers of his century, I recommend being familiar with what he has to say.
  • “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis
  • The Screwtape Letters” by C.S.Lewis — A novel of religious satire.
  • Handbook of Christian Apologetics” — Contains many counter-apologetic arguments. I went chapter-by-chapter through this work years ago. The posts are archived on this site and can be found through the search bar.
  • The Question of God” by Armond Nicholi
  • Paradise Lost” by John Milton — Milton, an early advocate of freedom of speech and the press, was blind when he wrote “Paradise Lost,” and yet, it is an epic poem, masterfully written, of dizzying work in breadth and scope. It is rich in religious and mythological references, which gives it educational value, and it is proof that religiously-inspired high art is still art, regardless of the content or intent of the author, and can be appreciated as such.

The Bully’s Lament

Christian Apologist Anthony DeStefano: Atheists to blame for world’s ills

I don’t want to give Anthony DeStefano a dime. Indeed, I only learned who DeStefano was five minutes ago when I saw one of his op-ed columns, with the laborious headline, “Today’s atheists are bullies — and they are doing their best to intimidate the rest of us into silence,” posted on social media. But if I can find a way to access his book, Inside the Atheist Mind: Unmasking the Religion of Those Who Say There is No God,” from which the column is adapted, without paying for it, probably through the library, maybe I will read it and respond here. For now, though, let’s see what DeStefano thinks of me, and presumably, all atheists:

Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.

We’ve all seen how these pompous prigs get offended by the slightest bit of religious imagery in public and mortified if even a whisper of  “Merry Christmas” escapes the lips of some well-meaning but naïve department store clerk during the “holiday season.”

He then cited three examples in which prominent atheist or freethinker organizations, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, exercised their right to free speech and protested potential violations of the separation of church and state. This, of course, is what free and empowered people do in a democracy, but to folks like DeStefano, behavior such as this is arrogant, ignorant, dangerous and pompous. Arrogance and pomposity are pretty close to the same thing, but I guess he was running low on adjectives. In any case, he has more childish insults for us.

Yes, these atheists are loud, nasty, unapologetic and in-your-face.

But while their arrogance is annoying, it’s nothing compared to their ignorance. Atheists believe that the vast majority of human beings from all periods of time and all places on the Earth have been wrong about the thing most important to them. They basically dismiss this vast majority as being either moronic or profoundly naïve. What they don’t seem to know – or won’t admit – is that the greatest contributions to civilization have been made, not by atheists, but by believers.

Here is a real bit of arrogance: Claiming to know what atheists think about believers or presupposing that just because DeStefano has had a certain experience with some nonbelievers, then that must apply to most or all atheists.

I don’t think DeStefano has had many, or any, personal experiences with atheists, outside of what he’s read in books or on websites, and thus, it becomes easy to generalize and demonize a whole group of people when one doesn’t have to be bothered to view them as thoughtful, intelligent and moral human beings.

Both nonbelievers and believers through history have been wrong about a great many things about how the world works. The difference is that intellectually honest people, regardless of whether they are believers or not, must be willing to change their minds if new information comes in that goes against their previously held notions. And people who are serious about searching for truth must search after it no matter where it leads.

For centuries, science has been ever-narrowing the gap in which god and the entirety of the spiritual world resides, and increasingly, we have had fewer and fewer reasons to turn to religion for explanations about the world because the natural explanations are much more rewarding and much more elegant than anything dreamed up in holy books.

It is true, of course, that most major scientific discoveries down through the ages have been made by religious people or at least people who claimed to believe in some kind of deity, but that is only because society and culture has been dominated by religion for millennia. These discoveries were not made because of religion. In some cases, like Darwin’s earth-shattering theory of evolution, they were made in spite of religion.

DeStefano’s claim that the “greatest contributions to civilization” were made by believers is easily refuted. Some contributors to science, culture and art were believers; many were not. To make a blanket statement like that is dishonest. But in many Christian apologetic circles, politically-minded ones even more so, intellectual dishonesty is a virtue.

Yes, the new atheists have an ignorance of history bordering on madness.

Uh huh. Next.

But are they really dangerous, too?

You bet they are. The truth is, the atheist position is incapable of supporting any coherent system of morality other than ruthless social Darwinism. That’s why it has caused more deaths, murders and bloodshed than any other belief system in the history of the world.

Do I really need to elucidate the abject immorality of Christianity again? A couple paragraphs from this post will do to squash any notion that believers, and their god, have any kind of monopoly on morality or ethics:

In real life, people are free — they have freewill — to decline a gift if the giver has, perhaps, overstepped her bounds and maybe was too generous. With Christianity, we must accept the “gift” of eternal life, even though we weren’t consulted about it first, we must fear the one we are commanded to love or face the fire, and good riddance all the while. If we happen to think the four evils of Christianity, vicarious redemption, scapegoating, human sacrifice and compulsory love, are inferior doctrines of previous barbaric epochs and want nothing to do with them, well, we can be damned for that too and shooed off to hell like the carnal garbage that we are.

Oh, and by the way, since God is omniscient, he knew who would be “saved,” and conversely, he knew the face and lives of each and every person who was going to burn forever — he knew them intimately — yet he chose to put this experiment called earth into motion anyway with the full knowledge that millions would not only suffer ghastly fates in their physical lives but would be tortured forever and ever in everlasting fire, many of whom because of a mere accident of birth. He knew them all intimately, this “good” creation he made, and would watch them fall down to perdition seemingly with indifference.

Atheism has caused more bloodshed than any system in the world. Really? If we’re doing a death total, the God character in the Bible puts Hitler to shame in the sheer number of people that died on his watch. Thankfully, there’s a website for that. Dwindling in Unbelief puts the number of human people God killed, either directly or otherwise, at about 25 million. And this doesn’t begin to account for the vast numbers of believers and nonbelievers alike who were murdered after the events of the Bible for heresy or witchcraft or, you know, for fun, at the hands of believers.

It is true that history has seen its fair share of psychopathic dictators who were not believers, but they reeked havoc on humanity, not because of their atheism, but because they were simply evil people. Atheism doesn’t necessarily make a person good, nor does religion make a person bad. Often, the converse is true, but assuming each is true and then generalizing about each to win an argument is, again, dishonest, and I would wager, decidedly anti-Christian.

The idea that DeStefano would, with a straight face, attempt to suggest a “frightening connection between atheism and death” is laughable. He trots out people like Pol Pot and Stalin to make his case and then tries to argue that Hitler, modern history’s top villain, was, himself, an atheist hellbent on ending “the disease of Christianity,” a quote DeStefano uses with arrogant assertiveness that was probably never even uttered by Hitler. It’s a disputed passage. Hitler’s thoughts about the Jews, and the entire Nazi philosophy related to Jews, was built on the idea that Jews killed Jesus, first and foremost, and that is the bedrock belief of nearly all of the hatred, bigotry, subjugation and violence by Germans and other antisemites against the Jews. Again and again, Hitler referenced “providence” and “God’s will” to assert for himself and for his listeners that he was, indeed, walking a divine path.

Here are a few, of many, examples:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (Mein Kampf, p. 65)

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God. (Mein Kampf, p. 174)

As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace. (Sept. 1, 1939)

I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence. (July 5, 1944)

DeStefano goes on to say:

Atheists don’t believe in God, so they don’t believe in any transcendent, objective moral law. Nor do they believe that human beings are made in the image of God, and so they don’t believe humans possess infinite value and dignity. When you put these two beliefs together, you have a deadly recipe that makes killing “problematic” human beings quite easy and defensible.

To suggest that nonbelievers don’t think humans have value and dignity and that killing is somehow defensible in any context is, not just wrong, but embarrassingly short sighted and mean-spirited. And we are supposed to believe that people like DeStefano have the moral high ground?

DeStefano concludes as he began, by calling atheists a well-trod schoolyard name: bullies. To review, in the length of a short op-ed column, DeStefano has called nonbelievers — many of them well-meaning, moral, truthseekers — arrogant, ignorant, dangerous, pompous prigs, loud, nasty, unapologetic, in-your-face, annoying, amoral, ignorance bordering on madness and dangerous (again).

Who is the real bully here?

[Image credit: “Constantine’s Vision” by DeviantArt user Julian-Faylona.]

Time to end invocations

If Pennsylvania residents or viewers across the nation watching the recent spectacle that unfolded in Harrisburg were unclear about where freshman Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton County, stands on Jesus — and by implication, where she stands on the First Amendment — the answer reverberated throughout the chamber more than a dozen times.

Apparently meant to serve as a kind of holy buffer and a not-so-subtle plea for forgiveness for what was to come later, Borowicz delivered a two-minute prayer that invoked the name of Jesus no less than 13 times and included a bevy of overtly Christian-based words and phrases one might hear at an old-time religion tent revival.

Near the end of the prayer, Borowicz went into full evangelical preacher mode, saying that “every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are lord,” which drew an “Objection!” from someone in the room. House Speaker Mike Turzai, who looked uncomfortable and, as far as I can tell, barely closed his eyes the whole time, then tapped Borowicz on the shoulder to wrap it up, which she promptly did, no doubt realizing she had gotten carried away.

The big news of the day wasn’t supposed to be the invocation. In a nation where the separation of church and state is routinely blurred, prayers of this type wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. But the prayer was particularly problematic because the state’s first female Muslim representative, Movita Johnson-Harrell, of Philadelphia, was set to be sworn in immediately after the opening.

It was an important milestone for more diversity in politics that was overshadowed, probably by design, by Borowicz’s overwrought and potentially illegal appeal to heaven — the Christian heaven, that is — that may have violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

This was a public meeting in a public building in a nation that has established religious freedom as one of its founding principles, not just freedom for some believers, but freedom for all believers and all nonbelievers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that open meetings can include sectarian invocations, meaning that they can invoke the specific god of the speaker, they must be reverential and “invite lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends” and cannot “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” according to the court’s 5-4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Borowicz careened well over that line.

But beyond the prayer to Jesus, the constitutional issues it raises and the impertinence toward adherents of Islam and to her fellow representative in the House, Borowicz’s breathless support Israel, both as a political entity and a theological mecca that all three Abrahamic religions claim as their own, was both unnecessary and beside the point.

If the goal here was to be incendiary and incite strong negative emotions, the opening succeeded. If the goal was to bring people together in a respectful manner, as invocations should, it failed. I dare say Borowicz was mainly there to preach, honor her religion at the detriment of all others and offer a thinly veiled rebuke of Johnson-Harrell’s swearing-in, no doubt one of the many reasons she asked Jesus for forgiveness.

Notwithstanding the House’s recent flirtation with constitutional impropriety, the chamber has already been taken to court for its policy of only allowing believers to deliver the invocation before meetings. Last year, U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner found that the chamber must give nontheists an opportunity to deliver the opening message. The judge also ruled that the House’s requirement that lawmakers stand during the prayer was unconstitutional.

In short, sectarian prayers are permissible in Pennsylvania, but lawmakers can’t be compelled to participate in them.

I have covered public meetings in which residents have petitioned city and county boards to allow representatives from secular organizations to deliver the invocation as a way to try to get the board to be more inclusive. Believers and nonbelievers alike have quibbled over the sticky issue for years. Trying to appease everyone doesn’t admit to any easy answers.

I realize it might be a radical idea, but the simple solution is to end invocations altogether, start meetings with a polite greeting and quickly move to the public’s business. Invocations, oftentimes abused more for grandstanding than to be reverential or to espouse “shared ideals and common ends” among diverse people, can produce the opposite effect for which they are intended.

People of all faiths, or no faith at all, have freedom to live as they see fit outside of open meetings. Using public forums to offend the religious sensibilities of others does a disservice to Christianity and to democracy.

[Cover image credit: “Prayer” by fbuk.]

Democracy under assault

Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.

“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”

No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.

Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.

The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.

In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.

To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.

Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.

“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”

Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.

To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.

For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.

In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.

“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”

Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”

While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.

The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.

[Image credit: “Freedom” by DeviantArt user Bozack.]

Unholy ground: The Bible as the official state book

Below is the letter I wrote to Gov. Bill Haslam on Tennessee’s bill to christen the Bible as the official book of the state. The legislation passed both the Senate and House and is now awaiting a decision from Haslam.

As I outlined in the letter, this is a bad idea for many reasons — and for Christians and nonbelievers alike. This appears to me to be just another in a string of proposed bills across the nation designed as a pushback against what Christian lawmakers and their constituents no doubt feel is the great demoralization of America, as members of the LBGT community finally get some of the rights they have been due all along.

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Lawmakers, preachers and those with a modicum of power, of course, don’t want this and seemingly feel threatened that, perhaps, they are losing their grip on America, as Christianity has already lost its grip on much of the developed world.

The truth is that however much believers like to claim the moral high ground, while at the same time castigating gay and lesbian people, even those who are in loving and committed relationships, as hedonists who are one second away from devolving into sex-crazed maniacs — a completely distorted and bigoted picture of reality — the Bible, and believers’ willingness to trust it on its own merit or on the authority of church leaders, is responsible for holding mankind back morally and socially for hundreds of years such that we humans, only now, are beginning to pull ourselves out of the mire.

As I said below, the Bible, whether the stories are true or not, depicts some of the most depraved acts and belief systems in all of literature. Only the most sadistic of fathers would create his children, set them up to fail in the garden, tell them about the wonders of heaven and then demand that they love him and worship him or else, face annihilation and unrelenting, eternal torment. Further, the Bible’s “teachings” about the supposed value of human sacrifice and scapegoating are borrowed from savage ages, and were it not for the centuries-old tradition of the church and humans’ fear of the unknown and their incessant need to be told how to think and feel, these ancient elements would have already been discarded in the dustbin of history where they belong.

But for Tennessee lawmakers, although they had scores of more deserving books from which to choose, the Bible was apparently the best they could do. This is truly sad.

If you would like tell Haslam what you think about this noxious bill, go here to send him a letter.

Here is mine.

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Dear Gov. Haslam,

Tennessee includes people of many different backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. According to data from Pew Research Center, 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents are either agnostic, atheist or unaffiliated with any religion.

State, local or federal governments serve at the behest of the people — all of the people — and as such, should not show favoritism toward one religion over another or indeed, to religion at all.

Passage of SB 1108/HB 0615 would serve as an affront to thousands of your constituents who don’t regard the Holy Bible as a suitable moral or spiritual guide. The Old Testament contains some of the most vile passages in all of literature with its tacit promotion of slavery and bigotry and graphic depictions of rape, looting and pillaging and outright slaughter in the name of religion. We don’t believe the New Testament is any better, holding as its central tenets eternal damnation for nonbelievers and people of other faiths and the immoral doctrines of vicarious redemption and scapegoating. The Bible is not fit to be the official book of Tennessee or any other state.

The Bible has some historical and literary significance, but it doesn’t just claim to be a work of literature or a history book. It makes serious claims about the origin of the universe, the nature of humanity, morality and God. The Bible claims for itself ultimate authority from God the Father and Jesus Christ, a message that, if foisted upon the state as the official book, would surely ostracize people of other religions along with nonbelievers in Tennessee. For us, the Bible has exactly the same spiritual significance as the Iliad and Odyssey, which is to say, none.

Notwithstanding the personal misgivings of myself, my fellow nonbelievers and advocates for the separation of church and state, it should go without saying that government officials should not use their public positions to promote their personal feelings about the validity of the Bible, much less attempt to translate those beliefs into law.

This legislation is a clear and blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution.

Moreover, making the Bible just another officially recognized state symbol alongside things like the raccoon, the mockingbird, the square dance and limestone, the state’s official rock, would greatly undervalue a book that many lawmakers, hundreds of pastors and millions of churchgoers across the state consider to be a sacred text.

For the rest of us — at least 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents and possibly even more — the Bible is a non-entity in our lives. That such a bill could even be considered in the Tennessee House and Senate, much less pass, defies logic.

I hope that you will consider just how bad of an idea this legislation is and veto it at the first opportunity.

Thank you for your time.

Jeremy Styron

Out of Eden: God’s love and the fall

The image to the right features an actual sign at a church in the area, and just across the street, another sign reads, to paraphrase: “Heaven: A prepared place for a prepared people.”

A friend of mine made a salient point years ago that, of course, still holds true today, even as Christianity has been losing ground to nonbelief the last few years in America (more recent research from Pew shows a similar trend), if church leaders insist on using passive methods like billboard messages to attempt to reach the public, they should at least be focused on getting people into the doors of the church, rather than making theological points that a large portion of unchurched people aren’t going to understand in the first place.

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In any case, indulge me while I unpack the message in billboard above and the message posted across the street. “When God made you, it was love at first sight” is essentially saying that, based on theology and biblical teaching, that God’s creation, man, was made in Yahweh’s image and was, thanks to God, endowed with free will to choose right from wrong and was given remarkable intelligence and complexity to be able to rule over the earth as a unique being among God’s other creations. It is also saying, from a more specific and modern standpoint, that God’s love extends to everyone and, to flesh out the idea a little further to really capture what the church teaches, God supposedly loves everyone so much that he sent his son to die on the cross for the atonement of sins, and even when a person chooses not to accept this “free” gift of salvation, God is supposedly grieved by the loss.

If we work through the theology logically and take the Bible and Christian doctrine at face value, we can see that neither statement about God’s love happens to be true, and even if it were, God’s love is actually inferior to the human conception of real love.

Here, I will have to slip into rhetorical language and speak as if I think all of this could be true for the sake of argument. Some Christian apologists have misunderstood this technique, as they misunderstand a great many things, to mean that I might actually believe in God and that I simply don’t like the story or don’t want to accept it. I, in fact, don’t believe, but in order to argue against this theology, I have to assume, at least for the duration of this post, that it could be true in order to fully work through its implications.

So, with that out of the way, the first thing that needs to be said is “God’s love,” agape love, is supposedly the highest form of affection that can be bestowed on another being in the universe, but as we shall see, it is a strange, debased, almost perverse, kind of love. Since we are told that “God is love,” I will speak of love as if it’s a stand-in for God himself (or herself).

God’s love is the kind of love that made it perfectly acceptable to place a wager on Job’s life, one of the deity’s most devout servants, and then stand idly by while this beloved follower was stricken with all sorts of personal maladies and afflictions. It’s the kind of love that commanded Abraham to kill his only son as a demonstration of his own love and devotion.

It’s the kind of love that created humans with the full knowledge that Satan would wander into the garden, under the roving, all-knowing eye of Yahweh, tempt Adam and Eve and cause the fall of the entire species.

It is the kind of love that foresaw from before the beginning how man would suffer and die for thousands of years under unimaginable brutality, enslavement, famine and disease and watched, as Christopher Hitchens has said, with “indifference” and “folded arms” before finally deciding to get involved a few thousand years ago in largely illiterate Palestine.

It’s kind of love in which the end, the salvation of mankind and the consecration of the new covenant, justifies the means by the morally bankrupt concepts of scapegoating and vicarious redemption.

It’s the kind of love that is responsible for heaven and hell, Satan, original sin and indeed, evil itself. For, if God is not ultimately responsible for these things — all of these things — he is not omnipotent or omniscient, and thus, not God.

It’s the kind of love that foisted mankind, without giving us any say in the matter, into a cosmic chess match between the forces of good and evil.

It is the kind of love that compels man to reciprocate that love, bend the knee or perish forever, that commands us to love someone in whom we must also fear.

It is the kind of love that condemned man even before he was created and then proceeded to make humans the carriers of a disease the church calls original sin that has only one cure — that same love, a terrible love.

If all of this is true, God, equipped with the complete knowledge of human history before creating a single biological cell, still hurled mankind into the grist mill, into the wreckage of earth, where we are told that the wheat will eventually be separated from the chaff, where far more than half of us, either unaware of the gospel message or unable to use our reasoning capacities to verify the authenticity of the stories and holy texts, would be cast down to perdition to cringe and scream and burn forever and ever, where we are shuttled out of the womb into the shadowlands, hobbled from the start by ancestral trespasses and original sin.

This is what you must believe about God’s love in order to be a Christian. Perhaps even more wicked is the idea that God, having knowingly shackled his “good” creation right from the beginning, “prepared a place” for those who, concluding that life without Big Brother was just too difficult a prospect, could then be shuffled away to a gloomy ingathering once the veil of woe was finally draped over all of life — the creator paralyzing his own creation and then calling the one and only antidote true love.

At issue, then, are the basic contradictions or incompatibilities between God’s love, humanity’s idea of love and the theological concept of sin.

If God, in his omniscience, was somehow surprised or caught off guard by man’s first disobedience, he’s not omniscient and thus, not god. Those who view the Adam and Eve story simply as an allegory still have to account for the enduring dissonance between God’s love and the problem of evil. If evil springs from God, then God is the progenitor of evil, and is thus, not omnibenevolent; if evil came from another source outside of God, then God is not a unilateral, self-sufficient agent, and is thus, not singular or all-powerful.

Apologists may argue that our idea of love and God’s idea of love as presented in the Bible are two different things: God can see the big picture and his version of love is more broadly defined to include a system of punishments and rewards as a way to teach and help us grow in the faith — the common refrain that we should become more “spiritually mature” — whereas humans’ concept of love is more narrowly focused on interactions and affection in the here and now. But for humans to even be capable of loving someone that we can only read about and pretend to talk to in our heads, God’s love must be relateable to us in some real way, and as I have argued, any reasonable examination of the gospel story will find that this love, real or imagined, holds little intrinsic value, except to those who are the most wishful-thinking, ill-begotten, downtrodden and hopeless.

The Bible must be an attempt to appeal to us, on some level, by human standards of love, but for many of the reasons I just laid out, it fails.

We can even go so far as to say that the modern conception of human love and affection supersedes godly love by several large degrees, and the contrast could not be anymore pronounced.

Real love, unlike godly love, does not come with contingencies. Real love, unlike godly love, is not compulsory and cannot be forced. Real love does not require a series of tests and temptations for verification of authenticity. Real love does not come prepackaged with guilt and fear. Real love is a two-way street. Real love does not require the complete surrender of a person’s individuality. Real love means caring for someone else selflessly as they are, not for who they should be or will be at some point in the future.

Real love, most importantly of all, is unconditional.

Islam and the failure of western liberalism, redux, and the regressive left

Several developments have taken place in the four weeks or so since I echoed the arguments of Sam Harris and others that western liberalism, infected by a hyper-political correctness and intellectual dishonesty run amok, has essentially failed the very people that we should be the most concerned about at this point in our history — namely, skeptics, homosexuals and women who are under the heel of oppression in places like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, unable to speak, much less, live freely because of the influence of literalist strains of Islam in their culture.

Dave Rubin with Maajid Nawaz

Dave Rubin with Maajid Nawaz

Leaders of western, secular thought in America and Europe, from the ivory tower and so-called intellectuals, to the media, apparently afraid of who they might offend, seem to have no problem criticizing Christians for their views on social conservativism, many of which are inspired directly from passages in the Bible, but are quick to dismiss people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris as bigots when the conversation turns to Islam and its blot on modern society. For my money, Dawkins and Harris have remained true to the spirit and nature of New Atheism in refusing to don kid gloves in criticizing the faulty ideologies of Islam.

Oftentimes, this inability or unwillingness to admit what the problem actual is is more pronounced, in the case of Muslim apologists like Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur, or it can take a more passive tone, as in this recent 1,000-plus word article from The New York Times. Here is what I said on Twitter about it a few days ago:

Apologists for the faith, and their passive let’s-skirt-around-the-problem-and-hope-terrorism-and-religiously-fueled-violence-just-goes-away-on-its-own liberal friends have been actively preventing us as a society from having the kind of open conversation we so desperately need on the true roots of jihadism and what causes otherwise intelligent people to become radicalized and willing to hurl themselves into buildings and lop off the heads of journalists in the first place.

Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris’ co-author on the new book, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance,” coined the term “regressive left” to refer to these liberals who are on the wrong side of the dialogue on Islam and on the wrong side of history.

Fortunately, in part because of the important work of Harris and Nawaz, that conversation seems to be taking place, at least in some capacity here in America, although my hunch is that the large majority of mainstream liberals, for example, folks who think Ben Affleck actually won the debate in his now-infamous confrontation with Harris and Bill Maher, continue to live with politically correct blinders firmly in place.

For the rest of you who actually care about things like intellectual honesty and having a reasonable conversation on the necessity for reform inside Islam, in addition to Harris and Nawaz, I would suggest seeking out related content from the following: Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Gad Saad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider and Ali Rizvi.

Obviously, all of these people are not going to agree on every point, but that is the point: to allow an open discussion on the problematic ideologies of Islam without demeaning Muslims as people or castigating those who dare criticize the religion as bigots and Islamophobes, which is just a counterproductive shut-down tactic.

Next to climate change, this is, in my view, the most important conversation we should be having globally.

Following is a collection of recent interviews and vblogs on regressive leftism and Islam that demonstrate the kind of dialogue that needs to take place on a larger scale among liberals and reform-minded Muslims.

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz on MSNBC’s “The Last Word:”

Richard Dawkins on “Real Time with Bill Maher:”

Gad Saad’s on Nawaz’s efforts to reform Islam:

Dave Rubin with Sam Harris:

Joe Rogan with Ali Rizvi (not as recent, but still an interesting interview with Rizvi, an ex-Muslim atheist):

Sam Harris loses his patience with the regressive left:

Exposing intellectual dishonesty one blog overlord at a time

Since I haven’t looked at PZ Myers’ account on Twitter before yesterday, I’m not sure if Myers’ recent blocking of me took place this week or at some point in the past for my numerous criticisms of Atheism+ or of Myers himself for his near limitless insults against people he routinely reduces to “cretins, goons and halfwits” — my quote, but I have seen him name-call all three — but the following tweet of mine from yesterday, in response to Myers’ juvenile criticisms of Sam Harris, a serious thinker who, in partnership with Muslim reformers, is actually attempting to address real problems and make a difference in our world, probably put him over the edge, that is, if none of my previous criticisms did the job:

Myers will never admit it lest his fawning followers suspect their Internet hero has a chink in his armor, but he knows this to be true.