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.

January–March in Review

My situation has settled down considerably in contrast to the last couple months of last year. My parents tend to bring up my lack of belief only when necessary, and that's fine with me: our relationship remains more or less as healthy as ever. The biggest blog-related development of the past three months has been the creation of the 30 Questions Project website. I'm quite happy with it now that it's pretty much finished, although I haven't decided what (if anything) I'm going to do with it from here.

In any case, let's review. Here are my posts from January:

• 2011 in Review: Reflections on the year & my 18 posts from the past 2 months
• The Tree of Religion: They proliferate via cultural adaptation & vague holy texts
• 5 Things I Don't Believe About Believers: Stupid? Crazy? Hateful? I think not...
• The 40 Questions Project: Clearly & succinctly listing problems w/ Christianity
• Hitch and Fry Are Wizards: A legendary debate on Catholicism's crimes
• 40 Questions for Fundamentalist Christians: First draft of the project
• Tackling the Big Objections: Responses to "I have faith" & "can't question God"

From February:

• The World We Would Expect: The one we'd predict the Christian God to make
• The 30 Questions Project Website: It's now up; you can find it here
• A Success Story Already?!: A thank-you from a user of the 30QP website
• One Nation, Indivisible: Analyzing believers' reactions to removing "under God"
• A Look at Rick Santorum's Madness: His quotes on sex, science & Christianity
• The God We Would Expect: The one we'd predict based on our universe

And from March:

• Errancy.org: A site that ranks Bible errors and responds to apologist excuses
• Through the Pearly Gates (Part 1): A story illustrating the problems with heaven
• Through the Pearly Gates (Part 2): There will be no more sorrow, they say...
• Quotable Me, Vol. 3: A third helping of thoughts on God, skepticism & more
• The Dullness: I was unhappy w/ religion growing up, but never truly questioned
• Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 4: More religion-related quotes from great minds
• The Book We Would Expect: Based on our world & the Christian God

The pace of my posting has slowed a bit more, but I'm not too concerned about that. I'm still happy with the quality of the content, and I have plenty of ideas for topics I want to cover in the future.

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.