The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Life Before Death. There’s a good variety of stuff there. I found a couple of articles that relate to recent events here.
We recently discussed John Hagee, the vilest of all fundies. Hagee wants to hasten Armageddon, because apparently Jesus owes him money or something. We also argued over whether Jesus existed at all. Dovetailing with those discussions is the article by Alexander the Atheist, “End Times: 2,000 Years & Counting”. A-the-A writes:
Virtually all Christians believe that we are living during the End Times…. Christians have major issues to address regarding Biblical scripture stating that Jesus would return within the lifetime of his original followers and Jesus not actually being a historical figure, making any debate on End Times specifics pointless because the Biblical end of the world just isn’t going to happen.
To which I would counter: The Biblical end times may not be nigh, but if Hagee and his followers manage to convince President McCain to drop nukes on Iran, we may all end up just as dead.
Vjack at Atheist Revolution is rubbing one of my sore spots with “‘In God We Trust’ Must Go”. I’ve railed against this thorn in the side of separation before. God doesn’t belong on our money or anywhere else in government that the theists keep sticking it. VJ argues against the slogan from three different directions:
The Tyranny of the Majority
Argument From Tradition
The Legal Rationale
After you’ve read those two articles, you should head over to the Carnival and find some more good reading.
In a comment on that last video, Arkonbey recommended a video by Marcus Brigstocke. It’s absolutely worth watching, so I thought I’d elevate it to the top for everyone to see.
I then went shopping around on YouTube for another video worth posting. Here’s Penn & Teller plus Michael Shermer.
The 58th Carnival of the Liberals is now up over at Liberal England.
My favorite article from this edition is “Love, Marriage, and the Church” by Seth Pickens. Seth is Associate Pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. In this excellent article, he advocates tolerance for gays, and he discards the silly “Adam and Steve” argument put forth by the bigoted.
Speaking of Steve…
This is unrelated to the Carnival, but Seth’s article reminded me of the very first real article I wrote for this blog. If you want to see some vintage Bay of Fundie (circa 2006), delve into the archive and check out “Adam and Who?” It’s a tongue-in-cheek (just don’t ask which cheek) “proof” that God really did create Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.
Bill Maher’s recent comment reminded me of a thought experiment I came up with to try to determine what, if anything, Jesus really was. This isn’t an attempt to determine this with certainty. It’s just a “what if…” to see what different conditions would look like.
Who was Jesus? I came up with six distinct possibilities. What if Jesus:
(A) Didn’t exist
(B) Was an ordinary guy
(C) Was a magician
(D) Was an alien
(E) Was a time traveller
(F) Was a deity/spawn of deity
I’ve arranged this list in decreasing order of likelihood. You are welcome to propose and discuss other options that I’ve overlooked. The real answer may even be a variation of one of the above or some combination of more than one.
The first possibility is (A): Jesus never existed. This is quite likely. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life, only stories that came later. Furthermore, some of the things he is supposed to have done are so monumental that you’d think that somebody would have bothered to mention them when they were busy recording the other events of the day. (“Dear diary: Today the whore of Babylon raised her rates again. I’m going to have to cut back to just once a week. Lot’s wife is almost gone now, so I’m going to have to buy another salt lick for the cattle. Oh, BTW, I saw this crazy dude walking across the lake.”)
Despite the plausibility of this scenario, it’s the most pedestrian of the explanations. What if Jesus had been real, at least a little bit? What was the original story that got distorted into what we know today?
Option (B): Jesus was an ordinary guy. What if he was just some preacher guy? What if he was just some annoying twit like Ray Comfort, who stands on the street corner annoying passersby with his logical fallacies? No miracles, no prophecies. He really said the things that are attributed to him, but he never did any of the supernatural stuff.
This is a very real possibility. Then all of the miracles and fulfilled prophecies were added in later.
Option (C): Jesus was David Blaine. The miracles that people witnessed were just street magic. Then as these stories were retold, the size of the illusion was exaggerated and new miracles were added to round out his repertoire. The guy could have played Vegas!
This is another very real possibility. It would have been very easy to pass off stage or street magic as supernatural ability. Charlatans continue to do it to this day.
Option (D): Jesus was Alf. This is what Bill Maher suggested. It is worthwhile to remember Arthur C. Clarke’s third law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
In this scenario, everything that Jesus is supposed to have done he very easily could have done. An alien landing in the middle of a simple society could very easily end up being worshipped, even if all he did was land for ten minutes so he could change a tire. There is still the problem of no contemporaneous accounts of his existence, so I would suggest that if this scenario has any merit, it would be that somebody appeared in the boondocks (the way the UFOs always seem to do even today) where there aren’t many people. The alien could have said a few things, done a few tricks, then left. The religion would have grown up around this. As in any oral tradition, embellishments would still occur, throw in a few unrelated stories that you can bend to fit the facts, and you have yourself a fully-realized religion.
Despite having just shown you how this scenario could have played out, I’d say the liklihood of it is remote. Existing UFO reports from today are shoddy at best, so we don’t have a good reason to believe that we’re being visited, either now or in the past.
Option (E): Jesus was Dr. Who. Just thinking about this turns my stomach. I mean, how stupid would our ancestors have to have been in order to be fooled by those cheesy special effects?
Maybe he was a more believable time traveller. Well this one would be almost identical to the alien hypothesis. It really wouldn’t matter if the super-advanced technology that the ancients saw was extra-terrestrial or not. I can imagine the traveller getting spanked big time when he returns to his own time for screwing over the timeline as bad as he did.
On a probability level, I’d have to assess this one as being even more unlikely than the extra-terrestrial. Life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe. The only question is whether they’ve gotten around to our remote outpost. The possibility of time travel is purely speculative at this point. There are lots of hypotheses, but they’re so far beyond our current ability to build that I cannot come up with a realistic probability figure. Until we have that, we have to keep this option in the near-fantasy category.
Finally, we come to option (F): Jesus was a god or god-spawn. This would account for everything attributed to him. It is important to realize that even if this scenario were true, we don’t know that the ancient scribes recorded the events and sayings properly. Modern newspapers can’t get their facts straight, so why would we assume that the ancients could, especially since they were writing decades after the events they chronicle? Even if the story is largely true, we probably have some of the major tenets wrong.
What about the probability of this option being the correct one? I’d say it is almost zero. There is no credible evidence that a god exists. Don’t waste your time on this scenario.
Conclusion
As I said above, I arranged these possibilities in the order of their likelihood. Option (A) is the most probable, even if it is the least fun. Some of the other options are quite plausible. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if any of the options except (F) turned out to be true.
There are a lot of choices on that list. Take you pick. Just make it a rational one.
The latest Carnival of the Godless has been posted at Mind on Fire. As usual, there are a lot of good posts. Here are a few that I especially liked, because they relate to things that have happened here recently.
If you read the comments on this blog, you’ll occasionally see a fundie drop Pascal’s Wager on us, like it’s some sort of divine revelation. They’re always so proud of themselves, like the cat who brings you the dead gopher. They’re both old dead things that have no current use, so stop dropping them on me. The kitty and the Christian are both eager to swallow their prizes whole. Daniel at The 327th Male isn’t. He has an excellent article about Pascal’s Wager. He explains it very clearly and then disposes of it easily. He won’t even vomit up the skin a day later.
I am frequently criticized for not respecting religion, as if it has some special protection that I’m violating. I respect the respectful parts of religion, and the respectful people. Everything else gets blasted. The Chaplain over at An Apostate’s Chapel addresses the question of respect in her article “What’s so Bad about Religion?” Here’s the part I agree with the most:
If believers want their beliefs to be considered as plausible foundations of social, economic, international, educational, or any other public policies, then I will critique those beliefs just as scrupulously as I would critique the beliefs of a Marxist, a Maoist, or a monarchist. Religious beliefs are simply one class of ideas among many that have the potential to do real damage to individuals, societies, and nations (though it seems self-evident to me that false beliefs will seldom pass muster as suitable foundations for good policy decisions). All ideas, religious and otherwise, should be scrutinized ruthlessly before one renders judgments regarding their soundness. Religious ideas are no more special than any others, they are simply more widespread and more deeply ingrained than most.
False. Freedom of expression does entail freedom to offend. In fact, in many ways freedom of expression is the right to offend. No one ever fought for the right to say nonoffensive things. No one ever censored nonoffensive statements.
…
Quick question: At what point will Westerners stop rewarding these theocratic dogmatic terrorists? At what point do we say “No, you are not going to tell us what ideas we can and cannot criticize. You are not the arbiters of what is and what is not okay to say.”
The last article I want to call special attention to is by vjack at Atheist Revolution. My own blog is about Christian fundamentalism in general, and Christian extremism in particular. What are these things? Vjack has some good definitions in “What Is Christian Extremism?”. He defines Christian fundamentalism as having these characteristics:
Biblical Inerrancy/Literalism (at least with regard to creation)
Evangelism
Premillenialism (expectation of second coming, rapture, etc.)
Separatism/Sense of Persecution
Next come the Christian extremists. Vjack gives us the additional characteristics of these people:
Exclusivity (conviction that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not “real” Christians)
Other-Condemnation (intolerance and condemnation of the other)
Anti-Intellectualism (especially with regard to science)
Social Conservatism and Anti-Liberalism
Theocratic Strivings (biblical law takes precedence over secular law)
Opposition to Modernism
Finally come the Christian terrorists. Fortunately these are rare, but they’re the folks who blow up abortion clinics and engage in other acts of violence.
Those are the highlights of the latest Carnival of the Godless, but they are by no means the only good articles. Go on over and check them all out.
What would happen if the Son of God returned today? That is the premise of The Second Coming, a British TV movie from 2003.
It’s the story of Stephen Baxter, an underachieving middle-aged video store employee who disappears for 40 days and 40 nights. When he returns, he claims to be the Son of God. In order to announce his arrival, Baxter alerts people via the internet. After all, if you read a wild claim on the internet, you know it’s true!
Unlike the lunatics who promote crazy ideas such as Planet X, Roswell, and Intelligent Design creationism, Baxter really is the Son of God. He lights up Manchester Football Stadium in the middle of the night with a column of daylight to get everybody’s attention. Then he tells them:
I know what you’re like. I’ve been you. Knowing there is great evil and doing nothing about it. Keeping my head down, giving a quid to charity, signing a petition, joking about it down the pub, but doing nothing. Even now I want to do nothing, I want to go home, shut the door and pretend that nothing is happening. But I can’t, because I was born the son of God.
The son of God came to you before and gave you a testament, but you did nothing. This time, there’ll be a third testament. A guide to living your lives today, and it will be written by you. In five days, I will be given the third testament, then we’ll start again, every country, every religion. And, don’t argue. All you Christians out there, don’t say “We were right.” Because I’ve seen what you’ve done. You stupid, stupid people. You’ve finally did it, I’ve seen it. Heaven is empty, while hell is bursting to the seams.
Naturally, this causes a bit of commotion. How people (and society) react is part of the story. Among them is Baxter’s skeptical quasi-girlfriend. There’s also the sub-plot of the devil and his plans to wreck the whole thing. Another part of the story is how Baxter himself reacts. He’s getting this insight from God in bits and pieces, so even he doesn’t understand it very well.
You might think that a movie with this premise might end up being some sort of Mel Gibson-esque heavy-handed morality play, or possibly some sort of feel-good “inspirational” tale. That’s certainly how Hollywood would have done it. Thankfully, the British are better than that.
As I was watching the film, I was impressed with the excellent writing and acting, but I harbored a quiet dread that the ending would almost certainly piss me off. As the ending started to unfold, I got apprehensive. Why was the one character behaving that way? It seemed wrong. The events continued to play out, and finally they were explained. Only one thought went through my mind: BRILLIANT!
Reading viewer comments on the Internet Movie Database was interesting. There is definitely a split among them as to whether the ending is any good. I suspect that may have something to do with the viewer’s religious and philosophical views. Certain flavors of Christianity would probably be unhappy with how religion is portrayed or that the ending is incompatible with their version of life, the universe, and everything. Some of us like the ending, because that is the way things ought to be. If only!
In the end, it really is a feel-good inspirational tale, but not in the way that most people would define that. It’s a very humanistic tale. Ultimately, it celebrates us as human beings, our potential, and what we can accomplish without crutches.
You need to find this movie. You can rent it from Netflix, Greencine, and probably elsewhere. You can also buy the DVD from Powell’s or elsewhere.
(Hat tip to loyal reader Ericsan for recommending this film!)
Don’t flame me for this title. It’s actually the provocative title of an article by Andrew Tallman, a columnist for Townhall. Unlike most fundie articles that I shred, this one makes some good points as well as a few bad ones. Let’s examine it.
Have you ever wondered why Christians aren’t smarter? I mean, we have the only true religion, we have a Book which is responsible for all of Western Civilization, and we serve a God who can safely call Himself the supreme champion at every trivia contest. So why aren’t we smarter?
Amazingly, Tallman answers the question posed by his title at the very beginning of the article! Intelligence is a complex thing that’s hard to define, but one aspect of it that most experts agree upon is the ability to learn.
Tallman says “we have the only true religion“. Right there, he closed his mind tighter than Michelle Duggar’s vagina (Oh wait! That’s a counter-example! I mean tighter than Kevin Wirth clings to the term “Darwinism”.).
If you start out by saying you have the only true religion, then you have blocked out all information that even appears to contradict that. Considering the expanse of Christianity’s claims on knowledge (biology, cosmology, geology, etc.), you have walled off just about anything you could have learned.
Then you couple arrogance with inability to learn. Tallman says “we have a Book which is responsible for all of Western Civilization”. No, you don’t. It was undeniably a large (mostly negative) contributor to Western Civilization, but it isn’t the foundation of all of our laws or any other silly notion.
Tallman’s next paragraph is a good one, though:
God commands us very simply: Love Him with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. Catch that last part … with all our mind. This means thinking is not optional for the Christian. Thinking, and thinking well, is a form of worship of God which is nothing short of obedience to His primary command. Hence, if we do not ”use the brain God gave you,” (my mom’s favorite rhetorical chastisement), we are sinning.
Here is a Christian leader urging his followers to think. So then why don’t they? My only guess is what I said above. Christianity’s claims on knowledge are so broad that there isn’t much left over to think about.
The only solution to this problem is for the Christians to actually start thinking about the stuff they’re not allowed to think about. Think about origins. Think about history. Think about philosophy. Their book isn’t complete. It doesn’t have all the answers. Why don’t they look beyond it?
The most pervasive myth about Christianity is that it is incompatible with intelligence.
This is what I believed before I became one, and it made me not want to be one. I say it is a myth both because nothing demands more thinking capacity than being a faithful Christian and also because our history is rich with intellectual giants.
It’s not that Christianity and intelligence are incompatible. It’s that only one can be active at a time.
I’ll concede his point about “nothing demands more thinking capacity than being a faithful Christian”. Have you seen some of the amazing mental calisthenics that Christian apologists go through to try to make the ludicrous claims of the Bible fit to known facts? Amazingly convoluted. That it’s a house of cards is irrelevant. You have to admire the ability!
I will also grant Tallman’s claim about Christianity being “rich with intellectual giants”. Most of the great scientists and philosophers of yore were Christians. Some were intellectual giants in spite of it. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they hadn’t been burdened by a mythological worldview.
Nonetheless, Christianity has a reputation as a religion for fools, and this is at least partially our own fault. By offering empty platitudes such as, “Well, you have to have faith,” when challenged with difficult questions, outsiders can be forgiven for forming the impression that what we really mean is, “Well,you have to be stupid.” This puts people in the painful situation of feeling like they have to choose between their mind and God. Also, it makes Christianity offensive to the smartest people in society, who tend to be culture’s greatest influencers. Thus, simply showing non-Christians that one can be both smart and faithful is a powerful form of evangelism.
I find that last sentence too hard to believe, but the rest of that paragraph is pretty accurate.
Tallman’s article is a refreshing change from most of the stuff I read over at Townhall. I only wish that the rest of the crop could be capable of making at least a few good points in their articles.
