A Friendly Conversation

Recently my dad caught up with an old friend of his. I didn't ask to use his name, so I'll just call him Steve. He became a Christian a few years ago after having been raised Muslim and remaining so for most of his life.

Steve wrote a short book about his experiences, and since copy-editing is on my list of potential career options, my dad volunteered me to read through it. It basically consisted of his life story, with a focus on his conversion to Christianity, as well as various arguments for his adopted religion and against other viewpoints.

The universally accepted meeting
place, for some reason.

After I sent the manuscript back to him, he asked about my own views, and upon learning I was an atheist, he suggested we meet for coffee so he could better understand my perspective.

So last Wednesday we spent thirty or forty minutes discussing atheism and related topics. I was a bit apprehensive going in, but thankfully it was a casual, friendly conversation, with an atmosphere of learning rather than debate.

He asked whether I had been a Christian by "default" or whether it was something I actively believed, so I gave him a bit of my background and conversion to Christianity. And how I became curious in my college years of what the opposing evidence looked like, how my investigation of creationism was the starting point for my eventual departure from the faith. 

From there, Steve asked me for my definition of atheism—always a good start for a discussion on the topic. I was pleased to discover that he easily understood the distinction between strong and weak atheism. I explained the need for evidence in proportion to the extraordinary nature of the claims made, and how the idea of God represents such a departure from everything we know about the world that it has an incredibly high evidential bar to meet.

Steve made a few of the standard points for Christianity, which I let go mostly unchallenged, to make sure we stayed in the realm of discussion rather than conflict. He asked what I think happens when we die, and pointed out that if that's true, it kinda sucks. No argument from me there, though it's not a total loss. He brought up Pascal's Wager, although more out of curiosity as to how I approach belief than as an argument in favor of belief.

The problem of evil was mentioned as an example argument, to which free will was of course the vanilla reply. I brought up animal suffering, which it seemed he hadn't considered in that context before. Steve's response was that if animals were treated differently, people might notice and see it as evidence of divine intervention, thus violating free will. While I don't find that very convincing—even if biblical God cared about free will, he could probably find a way to circumvent at least some of the suffering we see—for an improvised explanation, it wasn't terrible.

Steve thanked me for my time and for what he was able to learn from our conversation. He would pray for me, and that my bar of evidence would be met. Despite my warning that I may not read it due to time constraints, he said he would send me Josh McDowell's book Evidence That Demands a Verdict. And he expressed a hope that I would continue to research Christianity. It brought to mind a post I made a while back about my pro-Christian bias: that I've already given Christianity so much more attention than I would give any other faith.

Even though I don't think any minds will be changed as a result of our conversation, I'm glad to have had the chance to talk with Steve. It's heartening to know there are religious people who are genuinely curious about atheism, and willing to engage in a good-natured dialogue to learn about a different way of thinking.

Life in the Open

In church for Christmas. Nice decor, but
it could maybe use a few more trees.

It's been a little over a year since I came out to my family as an atheist, and surprisingly little has changed. Certainly, they were upset at first. My mom asked me tearfully over lunch why I hadn't told them sooner. A little while later she asked me, not threateningly but solemnly, if I realized what happens if I'm wrong about Christianity. And my dad and I had a few brief, cordial lunchtime debates on religious topics.

Sometimes my parents asked me if I wanted to go with them to church, which I politely turned down except for a few times when it seemed especially important to them—Christmas and Easter, for instance. And a couple of weeks before Christmas they got me a book of arguments for God, which I may work through here if it turns out to be worthwhile. (If so, I'm also thinking about formulating a version of my 30 questions for them to read in return.)

But what I listed above is basically the full extent of their reaction over the past fourteen months. Given that I spend time with them virtually every day, it's surprisingly subdued. For the most part, the topic of my atheism was barely touched after just a couple of weeks.

I have mixed feelings about my family's relative lack of interest in my unbelief. On the one hand, it's great. It's wonderful to be able to talk and have fun with them without feeling distant or uncomfortable. And to be clear, I certainly wouldn't trade this outcome for one where I'm constantly arguing. Still, part of me can't help but be amazed at what a small impact my coming out has had. Having grown up as a Christian, it's all too easy for me to think about my situation from the believer's perspective. If I were an ardent Christian and my sister told me she was an atheist, what would I do? Hmm...

My reaction is confusion, then horror. One of the people I love most in the entire world will be spending eternity weeping and gnashing her teeth in outer darkness! I have to do something, anything to convince her that she's strayed from the straight and narrow! I try to tread carefully around this sensitive topic, but I'm far too curious not to ask what changed her mind. Based on her response, I spend hours researching, steeped in books and articles from renowned apologists, training myself to make the perfect case for the Christian faith. Then, when the timing is right, I broach the subject as tactfully as I can and present my talking points.

Given the seriousness of eternal punishment, the only response that makes sense to me is to expend every available resource in pursuit of saving the lives of my loved ones. Granted, it's important not to come on too strong and drive them further away, but neither will it work to skirt the issue almost entirely.

...So why is avoidance the response I'm seeing here?

It's certainly not that my family is too selfish and unmotivated to come to my aid. They've demonstrated their affection in so many other ways that this holds no water at all. And it isn't that they don't believe what they claim to, just because their behavior doesn't perfectly match their beliefs. I hate it when people draw this conclusion about religious people. It could be that they're nervous about driving me away, just as I would be, but that's probably not the whole story.

I think the best explanation is that humans don't always think through the full consequences of their beliefs. Religious or not, we rarely make optimal decisions given the information available to us. In a way it's not strange to believe in a world of epic spiritual warfare, yet still fret more about what we're having for lunch tomorrow than about saving people from horrific eternal fates. After all, how much time and effort do we devote to worrying about trivial problems like morning rush hour, compared to serious ones like the millions of people suffering from starvation and disease? It's the same basic principle, minus the eschatology.

This may be the most important set of insights that leaving Christianity has taught me—is still teaching me.

Humans are irrational. We make bad, short-sighted decisions. And if we want to bring about as much good as we can, it's imperative that we improve our decision-making, both for our own sake and for others.

So I'm glad that I can live a life in the open, where I'm free to believe what I like without looking over my shoulder. But the next step is much more difficult. Can I live a life where I'm open with myself? Where I constantly challenge the mental weaknesses that keep me from achieving what really matters?

Can you?

While We're Young

I was going through all the ancient stuff I had buried at the bottom of my desk drawers and came across this:

It's a letter from my former church congratulating me on becoming a Christian, from way back in July of '96. I was seven at the time.

Seems so innocuous, doesn't it? They were so glad to welcome me into the fold. They assured me I had made the right choice, a vital choice, renewing the sense of relief I had from avoiding damnation. They invited me to the Clubhouse—the name has that enticing air of exclusiveness about it. Actually, they didn't invite me: the subtle use of "when" made it a foregone conclusion that I would attend. Tell your parents what time you want to come, they suggested. Have fun, watch puppet shows, sing songs. And oh, by the way, bring your friends!

It really was fun. They put on an engaging production in the church auditorium, surprisingly polished for a kid's program. There were engrossing quiz games, props and puppets flying everywhere, funny voiceovers over the loudspeaker—more like watching an interactive play than attending a sermon. The stuff for older kids was considerably more dry and dull, but they really knew how to reel in the six-to-ten crowd. They understood the importance of grabbing our attention from a young age.

I'm probably making all this sound too sinister. I can only assume that these were genuinely nice people with pure intentions. The goal was not to snare hapless children in some nefarious trap. But when good people are misguided, when they're incredibly motivated, when they have years and decades and centuries to hone their sales pitch, when their target audience still believes in the tooth fairy... well, it's not exactly a fair fight.

The Televangelist's Con

I was channel flipping last night when I came across a televangelist by the name of Mike Murdock. At first I thought he was just preaching some gimmicky message about "the five wisdom keys," but after a couple of minutes I realized that he was peddling his personal brand of prosperity theology. What you give to God, Murdock said, he will return to you a hundredfold.

He repeatedly referred to this as "planting a seed," and used his own life as an alleged example. He'd had only a few thousand dollars to his name and given most of it away, when suddenly strangers approached him with expensive gifts: a rare vintage car, a $10,000 check, a luxury van. His premise doesn't even make mathematical sense: if everyone receives dramatically more than they give, where's it all coming from? Is God stealing it from the non-givers or something? It's all nothing more than a religious Ponzi scheme, one invented wholesale simply to jump-start the first layer of the investment pyramid.

Then came the actual requests for cash: Murdock urged viewers to get up from the sofa and plant their $1,000 seed. You sometimes hear about the questionable practices televangelists employ, but it's a bit surreal to watch one of them gaze right into the eyes of the home audience to ever-so-fervently bilk them out of their hard-earned money. Interestingly, I never heard any specific information about where the money would go. Both in his TV sales pitch and on his horribly garish website, he says only that it goes toward "spreading the gospel." Sounds awfully fishy—and sure enough, it turns out that he spends most of the donations on himself. Less than one percent goes to charity.

Murdock specifically makes people in financial trouble the targets of his exploitation. He promises that your debt will vanish, that you'll make your mortgage payment, if only you plant your seed. He's intent on wringing every last coin out of them:

"Maybe you've got money in a closet somewhere, in a coin collection, in stocks and bonds. I don't know where you're going to get it, but you know."

One last bit of abuse that really made my jaw drop was his promise of "household salvation." He said that after one woman had promised to write him a check, the Holy Spirit had come to him and said:

"Tell her that because she's planted a seed to spread the gospel, every member of her family will be saved."

All those who planted the seed, Murdock said, could receive this wonderful blessing as a "fourth harvest" in the next 90 days. The words "insane" and "despicable" come to mind, but don't even begin to describe what this man is doing. When someone says, 'Give me money and your loved ones will receive eternal reward,' they've arguably splintered off from Christianity and started their own personal cult.

At first I considered the possibility that Murdock could actually believe what he was saying. But the more I read about his history, the more obvious it was that he's motivated by pure greed. He's taken full advantage of an environment that eschews skepticism and critical thinking in favor of miraculous stories and emotional appeals. My guess is that as soon as he steps off that stage, he's laughing all the way to the bank.

Fun With Memes

The r/atheism subreddit is often overrun with image-based memes that satirize Christianity. I have no problem with the memes in themselves—ideas are not inherently deserving of respect, and humor is often a good way to approach the more ridiculous ones—but they tend to get pretty repetitive and the logic doesn't always make sense. I usually spend more time in one of the reddit's many alternatives to r/atheism, but here I'd like to share a few of the memes that I actually did enjoy.

As a general rule, these memes tend to point out an inconsistency with some facet of Christianity. They're nothing groundbreaking, but they do get their point across in a concise, funny and sometimes unconventional way. I'll start with a few choice sayings from the big man himself:

The Scumbag Christian meme focuses on apparent hypocrisies common among Christians themselves. It features particularly obtuse fundamentalist Kirk Cameron wearing the Scumbag Hat as its primary inspiration:

Philosoraptor may use some unusual reasoning to reach his conclusions, but he often does have a good point to make:

And here's Condescending Wonka to raise a few final issues in his lovably patronizing tone:

If you like these, there are hundreds more in the r/AdviceAtheists subreddit. Personally, though, I think of them as I would a particularly rich dessert: slightly nauseating when consumed too often, but delightful in moderation.

The Purpose of Hell

Everyone agrees that criminals should be punished, but what many people don't realize is that there are several different theories about why punishing criminals is a good idea. Here I'll examine whether any of these penal theories apply to an eternal punishment in hell. I'll assume in this post, purely for the sake of argument, that unbelief is in some way a bad thing. But even granting this, what we find is that these five rationales either don't apply in the case of the Christian God punishing us in hell, or imply that some other punishment would be more just.

The first reason that one might be justified in punishing a wrongdoer is rehabilitation—punishment for the purpose of morally improving the criminal. But since people stay in hell forever, anything they might learn to better themselves could never be put to use. At most it would result in morally upright people suffering forever, which is clearly even worse than if hell was only filled with the unrepentant.

There's also restoration—punishment for the sake of repairing the damage resulting from the crime. But there's no reason to think that suffering endlessly in outer darkness would benefit God or any other possible victims in the slightest—unless we label God a sadist, who takes pleasure in our boundless pain. In fact, if we take at face value the apologist's claim that God is quite upset about having to punish us, hell seems to work against restorative justice.

The third is deterrence, which is intended to prevent crimes from being committed in the first place. Perhaps hell is a way to bully people into obedience. But there are two problems with this: First, given that 70% of people on earth are non-Christians, the threat of the Christian hell has been largely ineffective at the global scale. Second, by attempting to threaten people into genuine belief when in fact belief is not generally a choice, this form of justice would fall into the same trap as Pascal's Wager.

The fourth is incapacitation, or punishment for the sake of protecting potential victims from further harm. If believers are the victims here, hell would keep the evil heathens from corrupting them—but there are other ways to do this that don't involve excess suffering. If God is supposed to be the victim, it's unclear how hell is "protecting" him from unbelievers. Presumably he isn't so fragile that unbelief or even rebellion would cause him the slightest amount of harm. Perhaps rebellion harms God in some emotional sense. But in that case, hell is once again totally counterproductive: it's the perfect way to stir up even more resentment against him.

Finally, the crudest and most basic reason for punishing wrongdoers is retribution: the idea that evil deeds inherently deserve to be punished, apart from any tangible benefits that will result from such punishment. This may feel like an appropriate reaction, but it's really nothing more than barbaric, institutionalized revenge. What some perceive as punishment for the sake of some idealized "pure justice" is actually a combination of the other rationales listed above. Even if we accepted retribution as a legitimate penal theory, though, it still wouldn't justify hell. Retributive justice carries with it a sense of proportion: the punishment must fit the crime, and eternal punishment for even the tiniest sin certainly doesn't qualify in that sense.

There really is no justification at all for hell as a punishment. This is true because many sins are essentially victimless crimes, and because eternal punishment for sin results in no benefit to any party. However, apologists sometimes sneak around this by saying that hell is a choice: if we willfully reject God, he grants our wish by taking us to a place where we can be completely separate from him. Nonsense. He could accomplish the same thing by simply snuffing out our existence altogether, and avoid all the unnecessary suffering. This would serve as a perfect form of incapacitation (it's impossible to cause any further harm) as well as a more reasonable form of retribution (more proportionate with the perceived crime).

One last defense apologists occasionally give is to claim both that retributive justice is valid and that hell is a proportionate punishment, because our crime has somehow caused infinite offense against God's infinite dignity. Ridiculous. The relevant factor is not dignity, but actual harm. A crime against a king would deserve no more punishment than the same crime against a peasant. If the king threw a fit, demanding the culprit's execution due to some abstract violation of dignity, we would rightly label him a tyrant. If anything, the more power this king has and the more severe his demanded punishment, the more petty and unjust he becomes.

Hell is not only useless as a punishment according to most penal theories, but also highly unjust and even counterproductive. The onus is on Christians to show that this unending punishment can somehow be justified, and they certainly have their work cut out for them.

Born at the Wrong Time

I've had less time for writing due to longer work hours, and I'm in the process of finishing a couple of other posts, but I thought I'd quickly share a mildly interesting experience of mine from this past Sunday.

I don't go to church much anymore, but I did go to Easter service at my parents' request. It was pretty unremarkable and mediocre as far as "Sonrise" sermons go, but one thing really did stick out to me as particularly insightful—though not for the reasons it was intended to be.

The pastor's daughter made a very telling comment. She suggested that God was evident to us in the past (in the form of his interaction with the Israelites and his incarnation in Jesus) and will be in the future (in the form of the Second Coming), but that modern society is caught in a kind of "temporary atheism" because direct access to the divine is unavailable at the moment.

Well, how conveniently inconvenient.

What an odd coincidence it is that we happen to be living in the precise sliver of time during which God isn't overtly interacting with humanity. Christians who subscribe to this line of thought would have us believe that we happen to exist in a sort of divine "blind spot"—one in which God can't be empirically verified, one that looks exactly as if he was never there at all.

Do believers really find this kind of reasoning acceptable? Why doesn't it occur to them that God's "temporary" aloofness might be the rule and not the exception? And if we do reside in the one cursed era of an otherwise God-filled timeline, isn't that a needlessly cruel twist of fate? If he actually wants us to believe in him, why not give everyone the same strong evidence he supposedly gave in antiquity?

In John 20, Jesus lets Doubting Thomas put his hands in the crucifixion wounds and says, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." It's an appalling endorsement of belief without evidence, but at least he gave evidence when asked. As for the billions of skeptics who followed in Thomas' footsteps, I guess we'll be punished eternally for the crime of being born at the wrong time.

Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 5

It's only been a few weeks since the previous installment of Powerful Thoughts, but what can I say? My cup of skepticism runneth over; there are just too many good quotes to choose from. So once again, here are some about God:

• "God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown." –Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God." –Jean Rostand
• "If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts." –Bertrand Russell
• "If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has, filled with weaknesses?" –Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "You know when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God's the guy that ignores you." –from The Island

On Christianity:

• "Those who defend their abusers are the most comprehensively enslaved." –QualiaSoup on rationalizing religious atrocity
• "'Oh great, you ate the apple. Now I have to kill my son.' –God" –from reddit
• "There is no such thing as a Christian child, only a child of Christian parents." –from reddit
• "Moderate Christianity seems like a contradiction because its teachings are not something to casually think about here and there." –from reddit
• "That's an awfully nice soul you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it..." –reddit on Pascal's Wager
• "So far as I can remember, there's not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." –Bertrand Russell
• "What could be more terroristic than 'Believe this or burn for an eternity'? The answer is nothing." –Brian Sapient
• "To say that God was communicating in metaphor through the Bible writers is to say that God needed communications training." –Valerie Tarico
• "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian." –Mark Twain

On religion in general:

• "Religion claims to set its followers free... while insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer." –Paula Kirby
• "All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays." –Cathy Ladman
• "The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride." –H.L. Mencken
• "Rooting morality in a being beyond our comprehension only pushes morality beyond our comprehension." –QualiaSoup
• "The day gay marriage is legalized, nothing will change. And that is what religions are afraid of." –from reddit
• "[Religion] is partly the terror of the unknown and partly...the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." –Bertrand Russell
• "Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion." –Jon Stewart

On reason, science and skepticism:

• "Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you." –Thomas Jefferson
• "I had no need of that hypothesis." –Pierre-Simon Laplace, in reply to Napoleon, who asked why he didn't include God in his calculations of planetary orbits
• "Don't think that because the light of science is dimmer today than tomorrow that you are justified to sneer in the dark." –from reddit
• "Earth is a bacteria planet with a temporary infestation of vertebrates." –from reddit
• "[W]hat is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to ideas." –Carl Sagan
• "You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it." –Carl Sagan
• "[Some] think: 'My God! How Horrible! I am only a machine!' But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: 'How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!'" –Ray Smullyan
• "[S]cience is a form of arrogance control." –Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
• "Answers are a luxury enjoyed only every now and then. So early on, learn to love the questions themselves." –Neil deGrasse Tyson
• "The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found." –Miguel de Unamuno

And a few more cringeworthy quotes from fundamentalists and other extremists:

• "Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity." –Joseph McCarthy, at the onset of McCarthyism
• "The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not." –Josh McDowell
• "[T]here's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas." –Rick Perry
• "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. ...It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination...[m]ore terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." –Pat Robertson
• "Just because public opinion says something doesn't mean it's right...people said blacks were less than human." –Rick Santorum on gay marriage

You read that last one right, by the way: Santorum used the wrongful discrimination against one minority group as an example... to justify discrimination against another minority group. It's unbelievable what politicians can get away still with saying in the second decade of the 21st century. A couple of decades from now, society will look back at those quotes from Santorum and Perry with the same disgust we have for the racism of politicians like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

On a brighter note, plenty of the more clever and insightful quotes from this batch come from the younger generation—the denizens of YouTube and reddit. This dovetails nicely with Adam Lee's observation that the demographics of the recent Reason Rally skewed decidedly toward the youthful end of the spectrum. With all the bright, budding minds sprouting up, maybe there's a little hope for us after all.

The Book We Would Expect

I've dedicated one post to figuring out what world we would expect given the Christian God, and another to what God we would expect given the world we live in. But there are other elements of religion that we can examine using this method as well. For example, the way in which God interacts with us in most of the major religions: holy books. Given what we know about the world, and assuming a classical Christian God—omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and so on—would we expect him to give us the Bible, or something else entirely?

No Book At All?
Well, to start with, we wouldn't necessarily predict that God would communicate via the written word. This is especially true of ancient times, when reproductions were done by scribes who made mistakes and inserted their own biases into the text. Books are also relatively easy to forge: we do have methods for detecting forgeries (and the Bible has quite a few), but in principle all you have to do to avoid being caught is put the right words in the right order.

If God wants us to understand him, the best form of communication is one that would be direct, inimitable, and empirically verifiable. This could be as blunt and straightforward as appearing in the sky at regular intervals and proclaiming his commands in a booming voice for the world to hear. Christians at this point often object that this would conflict with our ability to choose or reject God, but to advocate this position is to deny the possibility of misotheism—and besides, as I've argued before, the Christian God doesn't care about free will.

In any case, let's assume for the sake of argument that God would communicate using a book. What would we expect from this holiest of holy tomes? Certainly we would expect God to distribute it universally, to all peoples and in all languages. If this information is so important, there's no sense in giving it only to a select few and waiting centuries for it to slowly spread across cultural barriers. We also wouldn't necessarily expect God to use humans to write it—and if he did, he would presumably find a way to make the canonization process simple and obvious, not seemingly arbitrary and mired in church politics.

And what of the actual content of the book? Well...

A Book of Clarity
I've noted in the past that while reliable methods of truth-finding like science tend to converge on an answer, religion tends to diverge into countless opposing dogmas. But it doesn't have to be this way: God could avoid most of the religious schisms and bloodshed by producing a book of maximal clarity. A benevolent God would communicate his message using unambiguous, easily understandable language—especially the parts of his message that are most important. For example, given the stakes involved in eternal salvation, we might expect God to devote a section of the book to describing, with pinpoint precision, exactly what he wants from us. If we don't start with the Bible, we would never predict the tangle of vague, scattered instructions that it provides.

This book, we might assume, would lay out plainly the answers to all the important issues God wants us to know about. For example, is abortion murder? For all the scathing condemnation from fundamentalists, the Bible never explicitly says a word on the issue, and may even suggest the opposite. Where do people who die without hearing the gospel end up? That's something that could affect billions of people, but since the Bible is silent on it, Christians' positions on the topic are all over the map. Perhaps God intends, for some reason, to keep certain issues a mystery—but even if that's the case, there's nothing to stop him from stating that intent outright.

That doesn't mean we'd expect everything in this book to be completely literal. Sometimes metaphor can be a useful tool for getting one's point across. But there's no apparent downside to denoting what's metaphorical and what isn't. When God does use metaphor, we'd expect him to be perfectly clear about that fact. We would not predict a book that begins with a completely inaccurate account of the creation of the universe—one that not only isn't labeled as allegory, but is treated as literal by other parts of the book, and offers no hint as to what its lesson might be.

An artist's depiction of Genesis.

Another aspect of clarity is applicability to the target audience. We would expect God's message to be applicable to all of us, not just a specific culture at a specific time. There are two ways God could accomplish this: he could use his book only to impart ideas that apply to everyone, or he could create multiple versions of his book, removing certain sections when they're no longer relevant. Ancient law, for instance, could be archived for reference, but there's little reason to include outdated material in newer editions.

A Book of Insight
If God expects us to accept a book as his divine word, it would need to stand out as something unlikely to have a human origin. One way to do this would be to offer predictions of the future or scientific insights that couldn't have been known at the time. Describing heliocentrism, evolution, germ theory or relativity many centuries before their discovery would go a long way toward getting the skeptics to sit up and take notice—and would greatly benefit humanity to boot. Describing specific future wars or natural disasters would have the same effect. Although apologist claim that the Bible does meet these expectations, the examples they use are dubious at best.

Given a benevolent God, we would also predict his book to be provide perfect insights in the realm of morality. At a time when various tribes and nations murdered each other freely, we might expect a strong denouncement of unprovoked killing. At a time when one man owning another was normal, we'd predict that God would state unequivocally that slavery is wrong. At a time when societies were patriarchal and women were treated as inferior, we'd look for God to establish once and for all that men and women are equal. Yet in the Bible we find God sanctioning or even endorsing all of these backward moral values.

A Book of Perfection
If God is absolutely perfect, it would be natural to assume his communication with us to be flawless as well. There are no benefits to allowing errors into the text, and multiple drawbacks: Every internal or external contradiction is not only another possible cause for confusion, but also another reason for skeptics to believe the book is not of divine origin. Of course, we see so many such conflicts in the Bible that we have websites dedicated to documenting them all.

We would also expect a book that originates from a single being to contain a thematically unified message. It could certainly tackle a variety of subjects, and even use different methods of delivery (poetry, prophecy, parables and so on) to get different concepts across. But what we would never expect to find are sections with ideas that clash starkly with one another—for instance, John and the Synoptic gospels, or the noble love described in 1 Corinthians 13 and the depraved, barbaric fury of Jeremiah 19:9.

Finally, if God didn't provide this book in all languages as I suggested above, we'd at least expect the translation process to be perfectly guided. It would make little sense for him to create a perfect message to humanity and then not bother to preserve it for the vast majority of his audience. While translations can't always be exact, God could easily have made the process smoother in a number of ways (for instance, miraculously preserving the original manuscripts). In the same vein, only a handful of translations should be needed in any given language, not hundreds of oft-conflicting versions.

A Surprising Book
So what can we say about the book we would expect God to hand down to humanity? Insofar as we would expect a book from him at all, we would expect that book to be...

• Universally distributed
• Easily authenticated
• Optimally translated

And in terms of content, it would be...

• Maximally clear
• Thorough in tackling important issues
• Applicable to all cultures
• Prophetic and scientifically insightful
• Perfectly moral
• Internally and externally consistent
• Thematically unified

Once again, the predictions we make are completely in conflict with what we find in the Bible (and with all other holy books, for that matter). How strange that God would communicate with us in a manner that's so contrary to our expectations!

Apologists might look at this list of predictions and say that the Bible lines up with nearly all of them, but I've already provided the counterexamples. What I'm interested in is their excuses for the predictions that even they must admit the Bible has failed to meet. Why is the Bible silent on some vital issues and less than perfectly clear on others? Why did God allow its canonization to be so muddled, its early distribution so limited? I'd love some real answers, although past experience tells me that any I receive will be remarkably unsatisfying.

Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 4

Welcome to the fourth installment in this series! It's been a while since the last one, but I've amassed so many awesome quotes over the past few months that the fifth will be coming up very soon. Here are some on the topic of God:

• "They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse." –Emily Dickinson
• "I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him." –Albert Einstein
• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." –Galileo Galilei
• "Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think?" –Robert Ingersoll
• "Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved?" –Joseph Lewis
• "If triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided." –Charles de Montesquieu

On Christianity:

• "Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently, Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them." –André Gide
• "Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything—just give him time to rationalize it." –Robert Heinlein
• "There is in every village a torch: The schoolteacher. And an extinguisher: The priest." –Victor Hugo
• "The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless." –Robert Ingersoll
• "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." –Thomas Jefferson
• "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." –Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. ... It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge." –Thomas Paine

On religion in general:

• "Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence." –Anon
• "Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." –Ambrose Bierce
• "Where knowledge ends, religion begins." –Benjamin Disraeli
• "Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." –Albert Einstein
• "The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum." –Havelock Ellis
• "Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." –Robert A. Heinlein
• "If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again." –Penn Jillette
• "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." –Seneca the Younger (attributed)

On reason, science and skepticism:

• "Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice." –Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• "Skepticism is the first step towards truth." –Denis Diderot
• "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away." –Eugene Gendlin
• "There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." –Richard Feynman
• "Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form." –Christopher Hitchens
• "Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal." –Robert Heinlein
• "Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men." –Robert Heinlein
• "The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche." –Robert Heinlein
• "It is a very odd world where people reject reason and yet benefit from the riches of reason." –Robin Ince

And finally, a few facepalm-inducing fundie quotes:

• "No one...fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails...because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God." –William Lane Craig
• "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." –Jerry Falwell
• "The fact that [John Kerry] would not support a federal marriage amendment [banning gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK." –Jerry Falwell
• "I resist Islamic immigration into the United States. ... I think our immigration policies ought to be reserved for...Christians[.]" –Bryan Fischer
• "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." –Martin Luther
• "Reason is the Devil's harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does." –Martin Luther

It's always a bit of a shock reading the religious quotes after the skeptical ones. To plummet from insightful brilliance to the depths of intellectual desolation can be pretty depressing. I recommend going back over your favorite quotes from the other categories to cheer you up again. I'm partial to Montesquieu's three-sided triangle god myself: what a clear and powerful way to sum up the human tendency to create anthropomorphic deities.

The Dullness

I'm a quiet and introspective person by nature. I'd rather read a book, for instance, than go to a party. But even then, I'm so dominated by my own thoughts that I find it hard to read books, because I'm stopping every few sentences to think about the implications of some character's actions, or how I would behave in that situation. I'm not saying that my thoughts are especially brilliant or revolutionary, but given how much I think, I find it surprising that it took me so long to really begin questioning religion.

As I was growing up, my religion was the one dull spot in my otherwise vivid internal life. It's strange looking back now, because I can recall my interest in topics like math and philosophy, in fantasy and science fiction, and the weird little doodles and notes I made as a result. Yet when I think of my religious schooling, there's a deep emptiness where the rich world of thoughts should be. I did my daily devotions and attended school chapel sessions just as I performed the various academic tasks of the day. I had no trouble doing "OIA"s in Bible class: observing the basic characteristics of a biblical passage, interpreting its deeper meaning and applying it to my life. But I approached it the same way I might approach an essay in my English class.

That's not to say I didn't care about my faith. I remember attending church each Sunday and chapel each Monday with a genuine desire that this would be the week when the sermon really spoke to me, inspired me to enrich my spiritual life. But it never did. In fact, I found it almost comical how virtually every message was related back to the gospel story of Christ's sacrifice. How many tiny variations, I wondered, could they possibly present on the same theme? Would I spend the rest of my life—the rest of eternity—forcing myself to feel awed by and indebted to this single act of Jesus, feigning interest in the same story told a thousand ways?

Most of the other students in my high school were no more enthusiastic than I was. We were all believers, but only a handful were what you might call "on fire for Jesus." Some of it was probably just the insouciance common in many teenagers, but the shallowness of the material was undoubtedly a factor. It was actually a running joke in my Bible classes that if you were asked a question but hadn't been paying attention, you could answer "Jesus" and have a fair chance of getting it right. There was rote memorization galore: learning the 66 books of the Bible in order, weekly memory verses, and so on. Intellectually stimulating topics were few and far between. Even my apologetics class had no discussion of some of fundamentalist Christianity's most difficult problems: the atrocities, contradictions and forgeries in the Bible, the inefficacy and illogic of intercessory prayer, the Euthyphro dilemma, et cetera.

Yet despite my discontent, it never even occurred to me for many years to question the most basic tenets of my religion. The reality of the spiritual realm was so drilled into me that it took its place among the basic, routine facts of life: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and God sits on his heavenly throne. I think it was largely this total immersion, combined with the eternal rewards and punishments that were ever fixed in the back of my mind, that held me back for so long.

Eventually, though, my natural curiosity overtook this area of my life as well. In some ways my current deep interest in religious topics is a reaction to this dullness, this dearth of serious thought about religion that dominated my first twenty years. It doesn't stop at spiritual matters, though: I've gained a new appreciation for biology and cosmology now that they're no longer shrouded in a fog of the divine. I resent the way in which fundamentalism discourages critical thought, and I hate the fact that other young minds are subjected to the same stifling influences that I was. That's one reason I look forward to the day when faith falls by the wayside: I want the seeds of curiosity to be planted in fertile soil.

Quotable Me, Vol. 3

Occasionally when I have a quick thought and either don't have the time or the inspiration to flesh it out into a blog post, I jot it down on my Twitter feed. Credit for a few of these goes to the sources I was reading or listening to at the time, which I sometimes condense down into a sentence or two. Here's some of the stuff I've posted over the past few months. 

On Christianity:

• Christians don't realize that each jump they make—from supernaturalism to theism to Christianity to fundamentalism—adds another layer of far-fetched assumptions.
• "Not a true Christian" is meaningless from an outsider's perspective since Christianity has no clear, accepted, universal definition.
• The idea that the earth is 6,000 years old causes serious problems for YECs, but the idea that the Flood was just 4,350 years ago is far worse.
• I've come up with a fun game. I tell a lie, and others spend centuries trying to find a way in which it's true. I'll call it... apologetics.
• Apologist (n.) – Someone whose livelihood depends on convincing you that genocide is actually a good thing when God does it.
• I've found that many Christians judge how well others understand the Bible based solely on how much others agree with their interpretation.

On God, religion and atheism:

• The rejection of this life in anticipation of a second one is the ultimate impediment to human progress.
• Vagueness is among religion's most powerful tools. Believers can disagree on every point of doctrine yet still take solace in the same book.
• Calling an unexplained phenomenon a miracle is not an explanation, but an admission of ignorance.
• God-based morality isn't objective. It's still dependent on a particular person; that person just happens to be an omnipotent dictator.
• Religion's most pervasive problem—and its greatest strategic advantage—is that for most people, it's "opt-out."
• Some people try so hard to label atheism a religion due solely to atheists' passion... so can we call "labeling atheism a religion" a religion too?
• If a god exists who punishes questioning and rewards blind faith, reason is the greatest curse he has ever conferred upon humanity.

On science and skepticism:

• Acknowledging a gap in our knowledge is the first step toward filling it.
• Once belief without sufficient evidence is permitted, everything is permitted.
• As a family that has worked its way to riches is nobler than royalty, so is humanity's evolution nobler than special creation.
• Denialists express parallel ignorance. Creationists: "Show me the transitional fossils!" Birthers: "Show me the birth certificate!"
• Idea for countering bias: when you find an opposing argument that you don't know how to answer, add it to a list so you can't brush it off.
• Three words that should never appear together: "required to believe."

Pretty soon I'll also post the fourth installment in my anthology of skeptical quotes from non-me sources.