The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails

by John W. Loftus

Nearly all modern Christians would have suffered under the Office of the Inquisition with what they believe, it's so far removed.

And last but not least, religion likes to have a say in human sexual behavior, including who, when, how, and why.

If a religion cannot control the secular schools, it will found its own sectarian or “parochial” ones or else simply “homeschool” its children.

In the extreme, if a religion cannot dominate the government, it may withdraw into seclusion (like the Amish or the fundamentalist Mormons) or attempt to conquer the government (like the Taliban) or establish one of its own (like the “Christian Exodus” movement in the United States that aims to literally occupy and control its own state government and secede from the United States if necessary—visit

The consequence is that there is no such thing as a single, unified, global Christianity but instead many, different, local Christianities, which often do not recognize each other, accept each other, or even comprehend each other.

while as early as 385 Bishop Priscillian of Spain and six followers had the honor of becoming the first Christians to be executed over theology.

“cargo cult”

Christianity absorbed many influences, from the Latin language and the hierarchy of the Roman Empire to Germanic/ Nordic practices like yule trees and Easter eggs.

Of course, the immediate result of these divisions was fratricidal war for more than a century.

the religion is reinvented for its specific time, place, and audience.

All told, by some estimates, there are as many as thirty-eight thousand sects and denominations of Christianity in the world today

Christians are not easily reasoned out of religion since they are not usually reasoned into it.

they are not so much indoctrinated as enculturated.

The real point is more profound but perhaps more discouraging: religion for the religious person is like culture for the cultural person—it is glasses, not crutches. And these glasses are not prophylactic—they do not help the person to see “better.” They make seeing at all possible.

The hope, and the obligation, is that once people recognize the diversity, plasticity, and relativity of religion, they will see little merit in it: that which is no longer taken for granted is often not taken at all.

Certainty is a feeling, not proof of knowing. It can fail to materialize even when evidence is enormous, and can manifest itself independently of any real knowledge.

Humans will always argue passionately about things that we do not know and cannot know, but with a little more self-knowledge and humility we may get to the point where those arguments are less often lethal.

As I say to my daughters, it is not enough to be well intentioned—even joyfully, generously so. We also have to be right.

Eighteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simone Laplace wrote a volume on the movements of the heavenly bodies. When asked by Emperor Napoleon I why he had not mentioned God in his treatise, he replied, “Je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.” (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”)

They believe simply because they want to believe, they believe because they have always believed, and they believe because others around them believe.

The Mormons taught themselves it's normal to believe in a prehistoric Jewish kingdom in America,

What one society perceives as normal, another perceives as a collective delusion.

As humans, we simply are not comfortable considering the notion that we might be wrong. We enjoy being right. Rather than entertaining the possibility that we might be wrong, we strive to convince ourselves that we have followed proper avenues of thought.

This process is highly illogical, intellectually dishonest, and potentially dangerous.

dissonance is a motivation to explain inconsistency and rid oneself of the dissonance.

Westen was among those who empirically demonstrated, using MRI scanning, that people who were strongly loyal to one candidate in presidential elections did not use areas of the brain associated with reasoning to resolve contradictory statements made by their candidate.

What good is a biblical scholar who refuses to consider that his point of view may simply be wrong? If

“No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.”

How can two groups of people consistently use two contradictory avenues of thought yet consistently arrive at the same answer, unless the conclusion itself consistently preceded the explanation?

Petty and Cacioppo point out that people with low self-esteem are more likely to accept messages that confirm an initial viewpoint, and less likely to be persuaded away from it.

Paul Bell of Mensa reports, “of 43 studies carried out since 1927, on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection,”

“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

Daniel Dennett sums up the psychological data in these words: “One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.”

Any loving god who requires us to believe correctly, when instead we have this extremely strong tendency to accept what we were raised to believe, especially if he'll punish us if we end up being wrong, should surely make the correct religious faith pass the OTF.

Religulous

A possibility is not a probability.

there is evidence of more than one creation story in the Bible. Mark S. Smith in The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 points out that the book of Psalms includes some creation hymns that were probably composed earlier than Genesis 1 and adds that those hymns and other creation passages in the Bible may represent some of the earliest beliefs of the Israelites about creation.

“Creation as Divine Might.” Concerning Psalm 74:12-17, for

“such as Psalm 89:11-13, Job 26:7-13, and 38:1-11 [also] refer to a divine conflict at the beginning of creation.”40

Job 26:12-13

Genesis 1:2 but also in Genesis 49:25,

Deuteronomy 33:13), and ‘Deep’ in this passage is feminine

But modern astronomers know the earth is not the lower half of creation, it's a planet, and each planet and moon keep their own unique time, “earth time” is not universal.

At this point in Genesis 1 the “sun, moon, and stars” have not been “made” nor “set in the firmament of heaven,” yet daylight exists.

Job 37:18 where we read the following in the KJV: “Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?” The

Proverbs 8:27-28 (NRSV): “When [God] established the heavens, [wisdom] was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep.”

Therefore, three different passages in the Bible, Genesis 1:6-8, Job 37:18, and Proverbs 8:27-28, use three different words to indicate (with remarkable unanimity) that the biblical sky, or heaven, is strong, hard, or firm.

Deuteronomy 13:7 speaks of “the people that are round about you…from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth.” Isaiah 40:28 says, “[the Lord is] the Creator of the ends of the earth.” Job 28:24 states, “He looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens.” Also note the use of “the ends of the earth” in Job 38:12-13, in which God asks Job: “Hast thou commanded the morning…that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?”

(Matthew 24:31) echoes the same phrase, “His angels…shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”

Psalm 93:1 states, “the world also is established [or fixed] that it cannot be moved.” Psalm 96:10 makes a similar statement: “the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved.” Another such statement is found in 1 Chronicles 16:30: “the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.” And Psalm 104:5 states “[God] laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.”