Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

by Dan Barker

The religiously independent (though primarily Christian) scholars at the Westar Institute, which includes more than 70 bible scholars with a Ph.D. or the equivalent, conclude: “The five gospels that report appearances (Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Gospel of the Hebrews) go their separate ways when they are not rewriting Mark; their reports cannot be reconciled to each other. Hard historical evidence is sparse.”

LEGEND

A legend begins with a basic story (true or false) that grows into something more embellished and exaggerated as the years pass.

When we look at the documents of the resurrection of Jesus, we see that the earliest accounts are very simple, later retellings are more complex and the latest tales are fantastic. In other words, it looks exactly like a legend.

PAUL (YEAR 55 C.E.)

MARK (YEAR 70 C.E.)

MATTHEW (YEAR 80 C.E.)

LUKE (YEAR 85 C.E.)

GOSPEL OF PETER (YEAR 85 C.E.)

GOSPEL OF JOHN (YEAR 90-95 C.E.)

DID THE DISCIPLES DIE FOR A LIE?

WHY DO SO MANY BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION?

SO WHAT DID HAPPEN?

Robert Price offers one sensible scenario. Peter’s state of mind is the key. The disciples had expected Jesus to set up a kingdom on earth, and this did not happen. He was killed. They then expected Jesus to return, and this did not happen. Nothing was going right and this created a cognitive dissonance. Peter, who had promised loyalty to Jesus and then denied him publicly a few hours before the crucifixion, must have been feeling horrible. (The day after “Good Friday” is called “Black Sabbath,” the day the disciples were in mourning and shock.)

Believing in God and the survival of the soul, Peter prays to Jesus: “I’m sorry. Forgive me.” (Or something like that.) Then Peter gets an answer: “I’m here. I forgive you.” (Or something like that.) Then Peter triumphantly tells his friends, “I talked with Jesus! He is not dead! I am forgiven!” His friends say, “Peter talked with Jesus? Peter met Jesus? He’s alive! It’s a spiritual kingdom!” (Or something like that.) Paul then lists Peter as the first person to whom Christ “appeared.”

Robert Price elaborates: “When a group has staked everything on a religious belief, and ‘burned their bridges behind them,’ only to find this belief disconfirmed by events, they may find disillusionment too painful to endure. They soon come up with some explanatory rationalization, the plausibility of which will be reinforced by the mutual encouragement of fellow believers in the group. In order to increase further the plausibility of their threatened belief, they may engage in a massive new effort at proselytizing. The more people who can be convinced, the truer it will seem. In the final analysis, then, a radical disconfirmation of belief may be just what a religious movement needs to get off the ground.”63

THE LEGEND IDEA IS RESPECTFUL

We do know that the human race possesses an immense propensity to create, believe and propagate falsehood.

People are really good at making shit up.

We can take the New Testament accounts as reports of what people sincerely believed to be true, not what is necessarily true.

PART 4

Life Is Good!

Chapter Seventeen

We Go to Washington

“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” —Benjamin Franklin

Groups such as Catholic Charities USA, Lutheran Social Services and Jewish Social Services have provided community services for decades with little apparent proselytizing (although not without occasional scandal, such as when audits revealed that Catholic Charities took free U.S. government surplus grain and sold it to famine victims).

Far too often, the provision of social services is just an excuse to proselytize to students, prisoners, patients and other needy people.

Why is there no governmental oversight of how public money is spent by these organizations and churches? Probably because there is an assumption that if it is religious, it must be good. It is assumed that we must simply trust the faith-based groups to be honest and responsible. Ironically, the separation of church and state makes the government reluctant to interfere with private religious groups. In reality, no church or religious school in the country is responsible to the public. Churches pay no taxes and file no IRS 990 forms—while all other nonprofit groups, including the Freedom From Religion Foundation, are required to provide these forms to the government to show where the money comes from and how it is spent.

Education, Health and Human Services (led for a while by former governor Tommy Thompson), Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Justice, Agriculture, International Development, Homeland Security, Commerce, Small Business and Veterans Affairs all had a faith-based office. They also started appearing in many governors’ offices and even within city governments. Encouraged by the Bush administration’s active courting, they were raking in millions of dollars.

Bush told the faith-based groups that there was a pile of government money and here is how you can get it. We think this is unconstitutional. Our secular government should not be promoting or funding religion.

They should figure out how to raise money with no special handholding by the government. That is what the separation of church and state should mean. None of us should be compelled to support someone else’s religion.

If my religion were so ineffectual that I had to go begging from the public till for tax dollars, that would be a bald admission of failure or, at the very least, of ineptitude, as Benjamin Franklin suggested in the quote at the top of this chapter.

The best hope for the world is secular government. There are enough real causes of social conflict on this planet without the manufactured cause of religious divisiveness. In a democratic, egalitarian society, we should embrace the freedom to disagree about religious opinions, which also means we should denounce the freedom to ask our government to settle the argument. The government, at all levels, must diligently remain neutral.

Chapter Eighteen

Adventures in Atheism

Americans between the ages of 15 and 30 are currently the least believing demographic in the nation, with as many as 30 percent being nonreligious.

We have suffered enough from the divisive malignancy of belief. Our planet needs a faithectomy.

As atheist conductor David Randolph, a Lifetime member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, writes in his book, This is Music, there is no such thing as religious music. Music is just music, and it is the lyrics that make a song “religious” or “freethought.”

As an atheist, I have learned so much, and I have enjoyed life much more than when I was a believer constrained by orthodoxy. Life is a great adventure!

Chapter Nineteen

Life and Death Matters

We atheists believe in life before death. Before we were born, there was a very long time, perhaps an eternity, when we did not exist, and it did not bother us one bit. The same will be true after we are dead. What matters is that we are alive now. These living, breathing, hurting, singing, laughing bodies are worth something, for their own sake. Since there is no life after death—how could there be when the body and the brain decay?—we have to make the most of it now, before it is too late.

Atheism actually enhances the value of life. We tend to give greater value to things that are rare: gold, diamonds, honesty. The air we breathe is important, but it is plentiful and we get it for free. (We only pay for it underwater or on Mount Everest.) The scarcity and brevity of life is what enlarges its value. We mourn the deaths of older people, but we consider it a greater loss when a young child dies. The fact that we are going to die is what makes life precious.

If life is eternal, then life is cheap.

Our lives are all we have, and we should enjoy them to the fullest, minute by fragile minute.

There is purpose in life. If there were a purpose of life, then that would cheapen life. It would make us tools or slaves of someone else’s purpose.

There is no purpose of life. Life is its own reward. But as long as there are problems to solve, there will be purpose in life. When there is hunger to lessen, illness to cure, pain to minimize, inequality to eradicate, oppression to resist, knowledge to gain and beauty to create, there is meaning in life.

A college student once asked Carl Sagan: “What meaning is left, if everything I’ve been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?” Carl looked at him and said, “Do something meaningful.”

Irving Berlin, the man who wrote “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” did not believe in a god and actually hated Christmas.

The human infant is half-baked, and needs at least a full year of complete dependency on its parents or adult community in order to have the slightest chance at survival.

Dawkins suggests that dependency on a father figure during childhood may be hard-wired into our genes, a necessary survival tactic of a premature primate. But as we mature, we eventually become parents ourselves with instincts and knowledge that we acquire on our own, as well as knowledge passed on to us from the previous generation. We then have less need for the care and protection of adults.