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.
The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.
The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.
This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.
Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.
In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.
Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:
Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.
So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.
Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?
That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.
The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.
Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Having apparently never read or fully comprehended the book on which Christianity is based, Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, the second highest ranking official in the state, has called for fellow believers “who are serious about their faith” to consider getting a gun.
In response to the tragedy in Oregon, he wrote in a post on Facebook that Christians have been the target of recent mass shootings:
The recent spike in mass shootings across the nation is truly troubling. Whether the perpetrators are motivated by aggressive secularism, jihadist extremism or racial supremacy, their targets remain the same: Christians and defenders of the West.
While this is not the time for widespread panic, it is a time to prepare. I would encourage my fellow Christians who are serious about their faith to think about getting a handgun carry permit. I have always believed that it is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.
Our enemies are armed. We must do likewise.
Credit: liberalbias.com
I’m not exactly sure what being serious about the faith has to do with self-protection, but is it really better for believers, who may or may not be trained well enough to effectively use them, to have concealed weapons and then, if the situation arises and while others are doing the same, pull out their guns and proceed to take matters into their own hands?
Also, doesn’t Jesus say a thing or two about nonviolence and loving your enemies? I’m pretty sure retaliation and in-kind violence didn’t make it into the Beatitudes. Does “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” ring a bell? Guess not.
I wonder how Ramsey and people who support the unholy union of guns and faith might rectify themselves with passages like Matthew 6:25-27:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
and Luke 6:27-36:
But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
In any case, doesn’t it show a supreme lack of faith that believers don’t trust their god enough, or at all, to protect them from would-be shooters in the unlikely event of a crisis? If their faith was really strong, a) why would they be worried about the possibility of their god allowing them into a situation where their lives could be in danger and b) why would they be fearful of losing their lives in the first place if the ultimate prize was heaven? The answer to both of these is that the lion’s share of believers don’t actually have true faith that compelled people like the Sept. 11 attackers and other terrorists to hurl themselves into buildings and strap bombs to their chests on the promise of reward in the ever-after. In fact, Christians know, somewhere deep down, that they actually aren’t protected, just like the nine people in Oregon weren’t protected, just like the devout believers’ children in Newtown, Conn., weren’t protected, just like students killed at Columbine weren’t protected, just like Christians who lost their lives in 9/11 — to fanatical supporters of a competing religion, no less — weren’t protected by the god of the Bible, just like …
They know, at bottom, that there is no spiritual savior from tragedy in this carnal life, that wonderworking soul-force is impotent and that physical force for protection is the only force that matters. So, they advocate for more guns and dishonestly wrap it up in a banner of faith. Whatever that might say about them, it says very little about the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
These guys are working hard for the prosperity gospel, and working especially hard to ignore the many passages in the New Testament that speak against storing up treasures on earth.