Slavery and the Bible

It’s not a great commentary that both Christian abolitionists in antebellum America and slaveholders in the deep south used the Bible to justify and defend their positions.

White agitator John Brown, who led an attempted slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., was a fire and brimstone, washed in the blood evangelical, yet, he, with biblical passages never far from his lips, was willing to die alongside his black brethren for the cause of abolition.

Meanwhile, bishop Stephen Elliott, of Georgia, and many others like him, including most southern elected officials and Confederate secession leaders, thought slavery was a positive good for Africans ripped from their communities – and often from their families – to do the work of the white masters:

Here is the very long-winded Elliott: Opponents of slavery should “consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw clearly the cognitive dissonance that was so pervasive in this debate:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”

Jesus never spoke a word against slavery, and Yahweh, of Old Testament fame, was practically complicit, so modern Christians, attempting to soften the blow and do their own interpreting, have claimed the slavery mentioned in the Bible amounted “merely” to indentured servitude, but nearly everyone, including the most learned biblically faithful readers of the entire 17th and 18th centuries, disagree with them.

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)

***

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.]

Kim Davis and same-sex marriage revisited

This post is a follow-up to commentary I made Sept. 4, 2015, on county clerk Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Ky. Here is the original post: Judge: On same-sex marriage, ‘personal opinions … not relevant.’

For those who haven’t followed Davis in the last year, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, signed a bill into law back in April no longer requiring county clerks in the state to put their name on marriage licenses, thus giving Davis and other public officials who object to same-sex unions a way out, as it were, from being associated with the sinful act of joining two people who, you know, actually love each other. The bill also stipulated that the state will use one marriage form, whereby couples can simply mark whether they considered themselves the bride, groom or spouse. Most recently, Davis has asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court to dismiss her appeal because the new law makes her complaint null and void. Happily, the ACLU, which was representing four couples in a lawsuit against Davis, agreed with the motion to dismiss.

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Amid a heavily divisive atmosphere in Washington and in politics in general, here is an example of a Republican-dominated state led by a conservative governor coming up with a common sense solution to a contentious problem. As I said in the previous post, echoing the sentiments of a judge who ruled on the original case, the conscientious objector provision does not apply in this case, and Davis’ opinion or convictions about same-sex marriage does not, and should not have, relieved her of her responsibilities as a public servant whose salary comes from the pockets of straight and gay people alike.

If she felt that strongly about it, she should have resigned and sought work in the private sector, where she is free to exercise all of her rights and freedoms as an American citizen. But all things considered, we have to conclude that this was a positive outcome for all parties, and Kentucky lawmakers should be commended in this case for making a smart decision. Of course, I can’t say the same thing about the state’s move to give $18 million in tax breaks to Ken Ham’s abortive $92 million Ark Encounter monstrosity under the leadership of, you guessed it, Matt Bevin.

But back to same-sex marriage. Essentially what I have argued previously was that religion has already and will continue giving up ground to modernity, and increased equal rights and protections under the law for members of the LBGT community are certainly no exception. Indeed, the church’s insistence on holding back progress in this way was, as I have said, “anathema to any kind of successful PR campaign church’s might hope to launch.”

Here is what I said about Davis’ biblical misgivings about issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

Refusing to issue the licenses, and thus breaking the law, should have been outside her set of possible actions in any case because breaking the law itself seems to antithetical to biblical law. Doesn’t the Bible say to render unto Caesar that which is the state’s and to obey civil authorities? I am aware that the Bible also suggests that believers should obey civil authorities unless the law contradicts God’s law, but this presents another problem for modern Christians because in a great many cases, Christians happily ignore Old Testament law. They do this whenever they hungrily gulp down shellfish, fail to stone gay people, demure from killing witches and fortunetellers or fail to carry out any of the scores of capital crime punishments listed in the Old Testament. And since homosexuality is barely mentioned in the New Testament, and not mentioned at all by Jesus himself, this amounts to one of the many instances in which Christians cherry pick parts of the Bible to read carefully and other parts that they readily scrap precisely because their conscience was forged by modern sensibilities.

To which, I got the following fallacy-ridden reply from a reader named Larry:

You … clearly don’t understand God or the Bible. Your education has failed you. Just by your statements in the old Testament and shellfish as well as stoning gays. You no nothing about the things of the Bible and now I understand clearly your beef with Christians. It isn’t because of things we believe it more about things you are totally uneducated on. So much for so called education.

I can’t find any semblance of an argument anywhere in there, but essentially, he says I don’t really understand the Bible and that I have a “beef” with Christians — I don’t on any personal level — and that my lack of understanding is at the center of this alleged “beef.” Since he didn’t bother to explain exactly how I was mistaken, I’ll do the work for him.

He might have argued, for instance, that laws in the Old Testament, like banning shellfish and admonishing believers to stone gay people, no longer have to be followed because of the new covenant of Jesus. But since many Christians obviously still read and draw a certain amount of inspiration from parts of the Old Testament, I think it’s still an open question: Should Christians adhere to Old Testament law or not? If so, which ones? Just those that do not condone violence or abuse? Let’s assume that the new covenant superseded or did away with adherence to the old laws. What do we do with the Ten Commandments? If Old Testament law is more or less irrelevant to modern Christians, why do believers spend so much time and energy protecting the inclusion of the Commandments on public property? The Bible’s position on these considerations is so far from cohesive as to make it all but unintelligible.

Whether the Old Testament should be followed to the letter of the law depends, of course, on which passage one chooses to read.

Take Deuteronomy 7:9:

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.

What about Psalm 119:160?

Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.

These passages, and many like them, suggest that God’s law is immutable and timeless.

Even Jesus seemed convinced about the unchangeable nature of Old Testament law even though he is supposed the architect of the new covenant itself!

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew 5:18-19

But many others, Romans 6:14, Galatians 3:13, Galatians 5:18, Ephesians 2:15, Romans 6:14, suggest the law was temporary and no longer valid.

The point is that Larry, Kim Davis and millions of believers like them don’t have a firm biblical basis for their strong convictions on same-sex marriage or homosexuality and since they probably have interacted or had a conversation with few, if any, actual gay and lesbian people, they can’t draw from personal experience either.

We are told that the practice of homosexuality is a sin based on the Bible. OK, but the only passages that talk about it openly are in the Old Testament.

When people like myself make the rather obvious case that passages about stoning innocent people or burning witches are among some of the most reprehensible passages in all of literature — thus casting an unmistakable cloud over the supposed omnibenevolence and just nature of the god, Yahweh — we are referred to the more peace-loving and palatable New Testament with its tales of human blood sacrifice, vicarious redemption, scapegoating and eternal torment. So far as we know, Jesus never said a word about homosexuality and the only passages that could refer to it, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:9-10 and Jude 1:7, issued from the mind of man. I happen to think all of it came from the mind of man, but the strongest case Christians can hope to make against homosexuality and same-sex marriage would at least need to come from a source that is attributed to God or someone claiming to be God, even if the texts were fabricated or embellished.

The vote is out on whether the Bible, from the Christian perspective, even takes a firm stance on homosexuality, and when it does take a stance, it comes off as brazenly barbaric and immoral. [note]Dismissing the primitive barbarity of the Old Testament on grounds that it can’t be judged based on today’s standards of morality gets believers nowhere either because they use their own modern standards to make judgement calls on everything else in life, and even about the wanton morality of opposing religions, so why should the Bible, which is presented to us a cohesive book from start to finish, be any different?[/note] We may go so far as to say that since the character of God in the Old Testament is supposedly the same today as he was yesterday (Malachi 3:6), maybe he actually does want us to go around killing gay people in the streets and torching witches in spite of the new covenant.

Comically, we might even imagine Yahweh and Jesus — if we can imagine them at all — bickering over these points. The best we can say, then, is that the Bible is incoherent on the topic of homosexuality. So, where do Christians and conservatives get the idea that they should oppose equal rights for members of the gay and lesbian community, most of whom they know nothing about, at every turn? Maybe that’s a question Christians should ask themselves.

The truth is that sooner or later, the church and conservatives as a whole, are going to have to exercise a small amount of reason and reform their thinking and behavior on same-sex marriage, just as they will, or already have, on other topics — the persistent and morally bankrupt resistance to potentially life-saving stem cell research comes to mind — or face continued irrelevance because they will ultimately lose the argument, as the wave of progress moves forward with or without them tumbling wayward in its wake.

[Credit: Cover artwork, “Falling in the Ocean,” by DeviantArt user kil1k.]

Haslam says no to Bible bill

Time to give credit where it is due. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has vetoed the bill that would have made the Bible the official state book.

bill haslam bible bill

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Nashville on April 12, 2016. (Samuel M. Simpkins /The Tennessean via AP)

This comes after both the state Senate and House approved the measure. The House voted in favor of the bill last year, while the Senate approved the legislation by a 19-8 vote, despite the fact that Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion in 2015 saying that it violated the separation of church and state. Haslam voiced similar concerns before agreeing to veto the bill.

The point that seemed to carry the most weight with the governor was the idea that the Bible would be devalued if it was placed alongside many other random and relatively inconsequential state symbols like limestone and the raccoon.

Here is what he wrote to House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville:

In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text. If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.

Although I disagree that the Bible is a sacred work, I can’t disagree with his logic.

I will take issue with the last part of his statement to Harwell:

I strongly disagree with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square. All of us should and must bring our deepest beliefs to the places we are called, including governmental service. Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.

No one is attempting to drive religion out of the public square, and local, state and federal officials are free to worship as they see fit and draw on their faith however they choose so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others or impede their work. What they can’t do is use public resources to show favoritism for one religion over another or for religion at all, organize prayer or Bible studies on government property during school hours, open with prayer during meetings of publicly-funded bodies or place religious symbols on property that was purchased with taxpayer dollars, all of which, like the Bible bill, violate the separation of church and state.

I have no doubt that at least one or two of these, perhaps all of them, are going on in many small, rural counties across this state and, indeed, across the South but because of a lack of resources and frankly, time, these practices quietly go unchecked.

Fortunately for believers, who, for some reason, think the god of all heaven and earth would care about what happens in a city council or commission meeting taking place in some podunkville county in the hinterlands of Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, the ACLU and other organizations that seek to expose church and state violations can’t be everywhere at once. And so, the exploitation of public resources at the altar of religion lingers on.

I must say, though, the fact that believers so vigorously defend their right to exercise religion in public even at the expense of violating the law shows a troubling amount of insecurity. If religion has that much going for it, if more people, not fewer, were signing up to follow Christ, if scripture was so self-evidently true, why do believers have to fight so hard to protect it?

Simply put, if the case for Christianity or Islam or Judaism were stronger, people would not be running from religion in droves. It would not need all this breathless support, and the all-powerful, omniscient god of all three messianic traditions would not need millions of cheerleaders shilling his message to the masses.

It’s not that people are rejecting religion because they are resistant to change or want to defile themselves in a heap of hedonistic pleasure and debauchery, as many pastors claim; people want to live genuine, fulfilling, lives of grace, dignity and honesty, and all religion has to offer is compulsory love and admiration for an absentee god; some highly unsophisticated, self-contradictory, cobbled together texts written by people who were so ignorant about the world that they didn’t know what they didn’t know; a barbaric sense of morality that carries vicarious redemption, human sacrifice and scapegoating as its main principles; and plentiful amounts of wishful thinking and false hope, all packaged in this sinister little word, “faith,” or, the pretense of knowledge in the absence of actual knowledge.

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.

***

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.

The sinister power of religious indoctrination

An omniscient being, with complete and intimate knowledge about everything that was ever going to happen in the world he was about to make, created man, all species of animals, plants, land, the seas, the sun, the moon and rest of the universe in six — literal or relative — days, and after concluding that all of it was good, rested on the seventh day. God put Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and instructed them to eat freely of any fruit except food from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

After creation, Satan entered Eden and tempted Eve to eat the fruit, which she did, thus trading a perfect life in the garden for wisdom, leading to her and Adam’s banishment from the garden and indicting the entire human race for the sins of just two people.

After the events of the Old Testament, which include handing down the law to God’s chosen people, the unfilled covenant that God would establish a Jewish kingdom or empire inside Jerusalem, the wandering, the conquest of Canaan and the defeat and exile in Babylon, God handed down a new covenant, this time with the coming of a messiah, which Christians claim was foretold in the Old Testament. Jesus, children of Christian parents are told, was born of a virgin and would grow up to perform numerous miracles that violate the laws of physics, claim divinity for himself, get tried for blasphemy and die by one of the most heinous forms of capital punishment ever devised by humans. After his death, he bodily ascended into heaven and, as the story goes, will return one day to separate the wheat from the chaff in an ultimate and conclusive ingathering of souls who stuck with Christ until the end of days, and those who are not written in the book of life will be annihilated and cast down into perdition (A la Satan in “Paradise Lost”: “With hideous ruine and combustion down/To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire …”) to agonize in searing torture with Satan and his minions forever and ever. Amen and amen.

Christ’s death, of course, is supposed to serve as a kind of vicarious redemption, whereby the collective sins of man are put on Jesus’ shoulders, and those who believe in and accept Christ’s “free” gift of salvation before the day of reckoning will be rewarded with eternity in heaven and reunited with Jesus and loved ones, etc.

This is the grim and weighty message that is often heaped on the young hearts and minds of some of the most vulnerable members of society before they are even old enough to drive, drink or serve in the military.

As I was recently sorting through letters to Santa that we run in the newspaper for which I work, I was disturbed to find that more than a few children either mentioned Jesus or God in their letters, and in one case, a second grader said he was thankful to be a Christian. Now, considering that most second graders are 8 or 9 years old, one can see, at least I hope one can see, why it is troublesome that young children, who have many years to go before they are even remotely capable of fully understanding basic points theology, should not be self-identifying as Christians. They should be allowed to be innocent children, unstained and unaware of the noxious claims of original sin and human depravity that serve as the basic pretext of Christian theology.

Whether they receive the whole message that I just regurgitated at the beginning of this post, or only part of it, children are in no position emotionally or otherwise to make a personal, life-changing decision such as choosing to follow one of the three monotheistic religions.

Sure, they may learn some inspirational stories in Sunday school about Jesus’ supposed super powers like walking on water or feeding 5,000 people with two fish and some bread — and to young boys, he may indeed seem like a real life superhero — but for churchgoing parents to infiltrate impressionable children’s minds with such weighty concepts like heaven and hell, original sin, sacrifice and vicarious redemption and arrogantly spoon-feed children their own set of beliefs essentially strips them of the ability to reason through their options and make an informed decision on faith when they mature and grow wiser in years.

This behavior, endemic in evangelical circles, is an incredibly insidious, callous, cynical and a cruel form of victimizing. So entrenched is this odious behavior that pastors and other leaders in the church even teach that parents should try to reach their kids as early as possible because — and here’s where the callousness comes in — statistics say that as children age, they become less likely to believe.

Gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be that as people age, they become more mentally equipped to reason through complex concepts, sort through evidence and make intelligent decisions based on the available information. If children are captured at a very young age, the notion that Jesus was a real man who walked the earth, performed miracles and holds the only key to life after death, and indeed, the only key to avoiding annihilation, just becomes an assumed reality.

Even though people with an ounce of inquisitiveness and motivation can come closer to understanding for themselves whether the Bible provides an authentic and trustworthy account of what actually happened in 1st century Palestine, indoctrination stunts the pursuit toward wisdom and knowledge and sends children the message that the pursuit of education, when it will eventually — in middle school, high school or college — butt up directly against what one erroneously learns in cobbled together ancient texts, is a sheer waste of time.

Indoctrination robs children, not only of a love and appreciation for learning, but of the freedom to pursue truth wherever it may lead. If the pursuit of truth is, as it should be, one of our highest aspirations as human beings, we would do well to search for it somewhere other than in the second- and third-hand accounts of scribes groping around in the desert, still trying to sort out where the sun goes at night. Indeed, studying cellular machinations inside a single blade of grass or fusion in the core of a star can tell us more about ourselves and our humble origins, hewn as we are from the cosmos, than even the most profound verses in the so-called good book.

Human origins of the biblical canon

One component of counter-apologetics, and certainly Christian apologetics, that isn’t discussed very often, but perhaps should be, is the creation of the Bible itself; that is, the series of events leading up to what we now have as the supposedly signed, sealed and delivered version of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament.

The running assumption in Protestant Christian circles, of course, is that the current work we now refer to as the New Testament was written and inspired by God shortly after the death of Christ in the 1st century and then compiled as the complete Bible with 66 books telling a cohesive narrative about man’s fall in the garden, his wandering in the desert, God’s followers prophesying about a coming messiah, Jesus’ birth, baptism, his miracles, his trial and execution and finally, his ascension and eventual return. Although doubting believers or inquisitive types may, on occasion, look outside the accepted apologetic literature in book stores and churches, most lay churchgoers simply take it as a given, as I did for so many years, that these books came together in a packaged, unaltered form straight from scribes and teachers in Jerusalem and Rome. Pastors, of course, know full well that this almost certainly is not the case, that the real history of the biblical canon is a lot messier than all of that, which is why it’s rarely, if ever, mentioned inside the walls of Protestant churches. If believers knew that the Bible was cobbled together piecemeal over the course of centuries, well then, they might begin to wonder about other aspects of scripture that look altogether manmade, and if that happened, pastors might have fewer numbers in the flock and so, the dominos might fall …

Church leaders can’t have that, so they sell a narrative about the divine origins of scripture, and simply leave it at that. And if an inquisitive mind does, by chance, raise a hand to ask how exactly these books came to us in modern form, they no doubt will answer in platitudes and vagaries, and make references to other apologetic works, as does Don Stewart, a contributor for the Blue Letter Bible, in response to the following question:

(Question): Who Decided Which Books Should Be Placed in the Bible?

The simple answer is that God decided which books should be in the canon. He was the final determiner. J. 1. Packer writes:

The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by his work of creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up (J. 1. Packer, God Speaks To Man, p. 81).

Stewart then quotes from someone named F. F. Bruce, author of “The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?”:

One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa — at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397 — but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of these communities.

The implied argument here is that early followers of the Christian church were already adhering to a set of traditions and teachings that were most likely passed down verbally through the generations. The church simply codified that which was already accepted as a coherent narrative carrying through from Genesis to the supposed events of the New Testament. Bruce only tells part of the story here. The work of shoring up various points of theology and developing what would later become the biblical canon actually began with the First Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. and subsequent synods, like those at Hippo Regius, Carthage and Constantinople through the 4th century. Although earlier writers like Origen and Tertullian had mentioned the concept of the trinity, now a central doctrine of Protestantism and Catholicism establishing Jesus as equal and distinct from the Father and Holy Spirit in the godhead, only at the council of Nicea was this idea solidified, despite the fact scriptures do not contain a trinity concept.

According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia:

In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word trias (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A.D. 180. He speaks of “the Trinity of God [the Father], His Word and His Wisdom (To Autolycus II.15). The term may, of course, have been in use before his time. Afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian (On Pudicity 21). In the next century the word is in general use.

And here is Gregory Thaumaturgus in the mid-3rd century as quoted from the encyclopedia:

There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.

The idea of a holy trinity, then, was “deduced from a collocation of passages” and developed over time, as early church officials read the concept back onto scripture rather than pulling it directly from the teachings of Paul and the gospel writers, and since church leaders could not agree on the trinity through the 4th century, nor on which texts were indeed, canonical, until that time, what constituted “general practice” seemed far from certain, as it does today, given the sheer volume Christian denominations and myriad interpretations of scripture still in circulation. Here is a detailed look at the development of the New Testament from what appears to be a Christian perspective, which is an exception to the general rule I mentioned above that many apologists simply gloss over the information on the various synods that helped develop what would later become the Christian canon.

Of course, the best way for Christian leaders down through the generations to try to prove the Bible is the authentic word of God was to either ignore the early history of the canon, which many of them happily did, or purport that the book was formed at some point early in church history as a complete work. Indeed, as I implied earlier, if the Bible did not come to mankind as a complete work, and with it, the story of man’s redemption beginning in Genesis through the gospels and Revelation, is incomplete, or at least it was incomplete for the better part of three centuries until church leaders decided it was time to pull together what they thought was the authoritative word of God. By the time the council of Laodicia rolled around in 363 A.D., all the books of the final canon were included, with the exception of the story’s culmination in Revelation.

As this article on the origins of the Old Testament points out, the Hebrew Bible was not even complete in the 1st century:

… the traditional presupposition that the Hebrew Bible was closed by the end of the first century is simply unhistorical. James VanderKam explains, “As nearly as we can tell, there was no canon of Scripture in Second Temple Judaism.” … So how did the Jewish rabbis come to agreement over which books to canonize? There is no clear answer. It seems as though the canonical status of the books were decided, at least in part, on the grounds of the date of their composition—no books believed to be written later than the period of Ezra were included. This was based in large part on the Pharisaic thesis that prophetic inspiration ended after Ezra and Nehemiah.[44] However, this presupposition is a problematic criterion for Christians who affirm that the Spirit inspired the books of the New Testament.

Although the majority of believers remain completely in the dark on all of this — church leaders are hoping they remain that way — this information is now readily available for anyone who might go looking for it, so pastors and “theologians” have had to spin a new yarn. The new argument among apologists goes something like this: While believers have disagreed about a few details here or there — a few? — the central tenets of the gospel were preserved by word mouth for centuries before it was ever written down and canonized, so surely this speaks to the truthful, authenticity, poignancy and durability of the message? I know longer have a copy of Handbook of Christian Apologetics, but I am certain that I read some version of this argument in that book years ago.

Daniel F. Lieuwen articulates the argument this way:

… Clearly, it was possible for people to be Christians with something less than total clarity about the contents of the New Testament. They were able to be Christians because they belonged to the Church which existed before the New Testament existed and has frequently been forced to make do with no written copies in whole areas due to persecution or poverty. The Church preserved and preserves the teaching of Christ and of His apostles, and not only the words on the pages of sacred scripture, but also the correct set of presuppositions, the authentic tradition which is required to interpret scripture correctly. …

Clearly it was possible, since Christianity is still with us, but this argument falls apart when one considers the nature of God and the actual claims contained in the Bible. In numerous places in both the Old and New testaments, numerous commandments are given forbidding followers to add or subtract anything from the “unalterable” word of God. Here is Deuteronomy 12:32:

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

One has to wonder if that includes the 27 brand new books that Yahweh, omniscient as he is, would eventually add to the mix. How about Proverbs 30:5-6?

Every word of God [is] pure: he [is] a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

Or the ultimate rejection of addition and subtraction from Revelation 22:18-19:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book.

The irony, of course, is that the church didn’t even accept Revelation as part of the canon until well into the 4th century, as Revelation itself represented a violation of God’s longstanding “don’t add, don’t subtract” message dating back well before Jesus issued his “new covenant,” another violation.

An omniscient and all-powerful god overseeing the dissemination of his one and only transmission to mankind and inspiring the writer of Deuteronomy would have known, at the very moment of inspiration, that parts of the Bible would eventually be added to and embellished and poorly translated, such that Deuteronomy and all the other books of the Old and New testaments read precisely as they should if penned by isolated, fearful desert wanderers grappling in the dark. Indeed, the Bible as a whole, pieced together a little here and a little there, developed exactly as we would imagine it would in the hands of imperfect humans.

On this count, Christians give their deity far too little credit in imagining such a sloppy creator who, when we apply just a touch of logic, disintegrates into absurdity.

Creationists and intelligent design advocates want us to believe that God, in his immense power, fashioned a world as complex as the one we live in, supposedly uniquely fitted to our purposes, innately understands every single nuance of the universe, from biology, physics, atomic theory and quantum mechanics, yet when the time came to deliver his preeminent message to the world, God somehow forgets all that information about science and the physical world and suddenly becomes limited by the middling rhetorical and intellectual power of semi-literate scribes.

What we have in the Bible is essentially a period-piece that is, predictably, built on archaic notions of sun worship and blood sacrifice trending across many mythologies and ancient civilizations at the time:

A truly impressive god, perhaps one even worth admiring, could have, with a single utterance or wave of the finger, delivered an impressive, noncontradictory book that accurately anticipates, to the stupefaction of his chosen writers, all the wonders of modern science and all the tragedies and triumphs of mankind without compromising on a basic message of peace, hope and love.

Under the spell: Revelation and mutual exclusivity

Other than its presentation of Scientology, which I would argue isn’t a theistic religion at all, the following video from DarkMatter2525, outlines with a good deal of accuracy — with a couple of quibbles that I will point out — the way in which many religions, and denominations within certain faiths, claim for themselves the only path to God and absolute truth:

 

Represented here are:

• Mainstream Protestant Christians;
• Muslims, who obviously do not acknowledge Jesus as god;
• Jews;
• Catholics, who are known to focus on the “faith without works is dead” mantra, although Catholic.com takes exception to that characterization;
• Methodists;
• Relativistic Unitarian Universalists;
• Baptists, and in particular, Southern Baptists, and more specifically still, redneck Southern Baptists;
• Revisionist Mormons;
• Creepy Scientologists;
• Babbling Pentecostalists;
• Meditating Hindus; and of course,
• A mildly (and ironically) preachy-sounding atheist, to which I take a little exception.

I wish atheist commentators wouldn’t stereotype some Christians, namely Southern Baptists, in this way as slack-jawed backwoods cretans, and while they may hold bankrupt ideologies based on equally deeply flawed ancient texts, most, from my 30-plus years experience with believers — as a believer myself and now as a freethinker — are more or less thoughtful human beings who just just been infected by the germ of faith, and almost like an addiction, have trouble letting go of all that false hope and comfort that comes from belief in big brother.

On the flip side, I wish we could also be rid of the characterization that atheists and freethinkers profess to have all the answers. While I understand what Peter Boghossian and “street epistemologists” are attempting to do in helping people explore why they believe what they believe by engaging the faithful in a socratic line of friendly, non-confrontational questioning, we do, it seems to me, run the risk of crossing a line between merely having a conversation on faith and proselytizing, to which Boghossian would probably retort, “Not if you’re doing it right.” I do, of course, wish that more people would find the light of reason, re-examine their faith and conclude that we can, individually and as a species, live more fulfilling lives without god and religion, and if merely sharing my opinion achieves that outcome for some people, all the better, but I try not to actively “win converts” to the cause because atheism itself has no cause. All content that I produce or share through my website or social media is voluntarily consumed. People are free to hear what I have to say or simply ignore me. Unfortunately, the faithful, from street preachers, evangelizers and missionaries shilling the gospel message on unwitting Africans or South Americans, don’t extend the same courtesy to the rest of us.

That said, one of the main points of this video — and as far as I can tell nearly all of DarkMatter’s excellent videos — is to make people laugh and poke fun at religion all the while. The highlight for me was this brilliant exchange between the Mormon, a black Methodist and a Scientologist:

Mormon: Jesus visited the Indians and cursed black people.
Black guy: Say What?
Mormon: And I’m going to get my own planet after I die.
Scientologist: Not if Xenu escapes his volcano prison.
Black guy: Say what?
Pentecostalist: Ooglyscooglekutalooloolabidabitakasslope …

Say what, indeed.

The other point of the video, of course, is to make the rather obvious case — although it must not be so obvious to millions of believers — that many, if not all, mainstream religions profess to be the one and only conduit of information from heaven, while all others offer only false narratives.

But as the video suggests, if a perfect deity really was the source of all information known to man, would it not have wanted to make sure, in all its omniscience and power, to get its message right the first time, such that thousands of different and warring doctrines and ideologies could not have possibly developed that cast doubt on all other competing doctrines?

Credit: SaintGasoline.com

Credit: SaintGasoline.com

At best, this is sloppy work from a being who is supposed to be flawless; at worst, this is deleterious to the existence of an all-knowing, omniscient, perfect god. As DarkMatter tells us, a perfect god would have simply gotten it right the first time.

Freethinkers don’t pretend to have all the answers about life and the universe, but we do have a more trustworthy method for finding out what is true about the world, and that is precisely the point. Whereas religion professes to have all the answers to life’s greatest questions without a shred of evidence for any of it, science is about the business of collecting facts and data to close the gaps in our knowledge about the origin of the universe and our place in the cosmos in an environment where learning and asking questions is, not just OK, but encouraged.

With good reason, then, Christians across the globe begin teaching young children myths about creationism and intelligent design and downplaying the real science of evolution by natural selection; they know the proliferation of facts and empirical evidence is detrimental to faith itself — as did Darwin when he first hypothesized about evolution — so they claim to have a direct information feed from heaven. Unfortunately for them, many other religions make the exact same claim. They can’t all be right, but they can all sure be wrong.