More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What struck me so forcefully was the realization that ‘the Christians’ react to your questioning as they do, not because you have lost your faith, but because you have lost theirs!”
Faith is what you need when you don’t have certainty. The more you learn, the less you need to believe.
It turns out that atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism. It is not a philosophy of life and it offers no values. It predicts nothing of morality or motives.
There are millions of people who claim to know a deity, but this is a statement about humanity, not about the reality of their gods.
Believers in one particular god have no trouble dismissing the “personal experiences” of the believers of other gods, so they must agree with me that the human race possesses an immense propensity to subjectively “know” things that are wrong. What makes them exempt from such error crafting?
Ethical systems are based on the worth humans have assigned to life: “good” is that which enhances life and “evil” is that which threatens it. We do not need a deity to tell us it is wrong to kill, lie or steal. Humans have always had the potential to use their minds to determine what is kind and reasonable.
To call god a “nonphysical being” is contradictory. A being must exist as some form of mass in space and time. But even if such a being existed, what authenticity could its opinions hold regarding us physical creatures?
Values reside within physical brains, so if morality points to “god” then we are it.
“If there is no absolute moral standard then there is no ultimate right or wrong. Without God there is no ethical basis, and social order would disintegrate. Our laws are based on scripture.” This is an argument for belief in a god, not for the existence of a god.
Any scriptures that might support a good law do so only because they have met the test of human values, which long predate the ineffective Ten Commandments.
If it is possible to think of a god as uncaused, then it is possible to think the same of the universe.
It is not a case for a god’s existence; it is an argument for belief, based on a threat of violence.
It is not true that the believer loses nothing. We diminish this life by preferring the myth of an afterlife. We sacrifice honesty to the maintenance of a lie. Religion demands time, energy and money, draining valuable human resources from the improvement of this world. Religious conformity, a tool of tyrants, is a threat to freedom.
What kind of person would eternally torment an honest doubter? If their god is so unjust, then theists are in as much danger as atheists.
Pascal was a Catholic and assumed that the existence of a god meant the Christian God. However, the Islamic Allah might be the true god, which turns Pascal’s Wager into a riskier gamble than intended.
Outrageous claims require outrageous proof. A criterion of critical history is the assumption of natural regularity over time. This precludes miracles, which by definition “override” natural law. If we allow for miracles, then all documents, including the bible, become worthless as history.
“The new science of quantum physics is showing that reality is uncertain and less concrete. There is now room for miracles. A theistic world view is not inconsistent with science.” A miracle is supposed to be a suspension of natural law that points to a transcendent realm. If the new science makes miracles naturally possible (a self-contradictory concept), then there is no supernatural realm and no God.
Faith is the acceptance of the truth of a statement in spite of insufficient or contradictory evidence, and has never been consistent with reason.
Faith, by its very invocation, is a transparent admission that religious claims cannot stand on their own two feet.
Like the computer virus, an omniscient God gets caught in an infinite loop keeping track of itself and cannot have a single thought. (Maybe that’s why the God of the Old Testament blows his stack so much.)
Regardless of whether the existence of evil can be theologically explicated, an all-knowing Creator deliberately placed humans in its path. This is at least criminal negligence, if not malice. Those who invoke “free will” forget that we all act according to a human nature that was supposedly created by God himself. You can argue all around the bushes on this point, but you can’t get away from the fact that Adam did not create his own nature.
What do believers mean when they say their god is all-powerful? (Let’s ignore the fact that the biblical God is weaker than chariots of iron, according to Judges 1:19.)
The very idea of existence requires limited power, limited mass, limited energy. Since “spirit” has no power, a powerful spiritual being cannot exist.
Although technically the Problem of Evil is not an incoherency argument—the existence of evil is positive empirical evidence against the existence of an all-good deity—it is the “omni” in omnibenevolence that makes it incompatible with omniscience.
If God knows in advance that there will be evil as a direct or indirect result of his actions, then he is not all good. He is at least partly responsible for the harm. Since God has the desire and the power to eliminate evil, why doesn’t he?
How could he have created an angel named Lucifer who possessed some quirk in his character that would cause him to go wrong? If this were deliberate, then God is an accessory to evil. If it were accidental, then God is not omnipotent.
If facts cannot be changed, then this limits the power of God. If God knows what will happen tomorrow, then he is impotent to change it. If he changes it anyway, then he was not omniscient.
Free will, if it exists, requires that you not know the future. However, if you are omniscient, you already know all of your future choices and you are not free to change what you know in advance. You cannot make decisions. You do not have a period of uncertainty and flexibility before selecting. You do not have free will.
To say that God is present in a “spiritual” sense is meaningless until “spirit” is defined. Since spirit is normally described as something “immaterial” or “transcendent” (which merely identify what it is not, not what it is), this means that being present spiritually is not to be present at all. We may as well say that “God is sshhffhgtyrh” rather than “God is omnipresent.”
“Daddy, if God made everything, who made God?” My daughter, Kristi, asked me this when she was five years old. “Good question,” I replied. Even a child sees the problem with the traditional cosmological argument.
ancestors. Theists who agree that the universe originated in a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago should not be uncomfortable with the observation that life evolved over that vast period of time. (Those few theists who accept cosmology but reject biology may be picking their experts based on theology rather than science.)
By the way, I have never heard a coherent definition of what it means for a god to exist “outside of time.” This seems to be an equivocation, a hand-waving dodge of the issue. To “exist” (as an object) means to occupy space and time. Things that exist are measurable.
Every point in time is the “beginning” and every point in time is the “end.” It is meaningless to ask “When did time start?” or “What happened before time started?” In fact, scientists insist that the dimension of time is simply a by-product of objects moving in space. Before there was matter, there was no before.
The word “moral” appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does “morality,” “ethics” or “ethical.” To inquire if the bible is a good moral guide is to ask a question that originates outside the bible.
any version of a “holy book” that contains barbaric decrees cannot be entirely palatable to the modern world. Perhaps it could be argued that some parts are still relevant, but the bible as a whole is undeniably flawed.
Christians, it turns out, don’t have a corner on morality. On average they are no more moral than unbelievers. Some might argue that they are less moral. Those few shining examples from the Christian community shine no brighter than the caring unbelievers. But for all their talk about the need for moral guidance, they cannot substantiate the claim that the bible is a good guide for modern behavior.
The humanist, on the other hand, looks for some reason or principle independent of authority. The child asks, “Why can’t I do this?” Daddy or Mommy responds, “If you do it, you will get hurt. I love you and don’t want you to get hurt.” Or the parent says, “If you do this, someone else will get hurt.”
Unless… unless you argue from authority and the authority figure decrees, for no good reason, that such an action offends Him. People who believe they are living under the thumb of such a vain and petty lord are not guided by ethics; they are guided by fear. The bible turns out to be not a moral code, but a whip.
This is a circular argument, of course. Don’t question the bible. Why? Because the bible says so.
Speaking for myself, if the biblical heaven and hell exist, I would choose hell. Having to spend eternity pretending to worship a petty tyrant who tortures those who insult his authority would be more hellish than baking in eternal flames. There is no way such a bully can earn my admiration.
The bible nowhere states that every human being possesses an inherent right to be treated with respect or fairness. Generally, everything flows from God to humans, not the other way around.
It is all on God’s side. If God can grant rights then he can take them away, meaning that there actually are no human rights in God’s scheme.
Modern warm and fuzzy American Protestants who try to distance themselves from such intolerance and brutality should ask themselves: would I prefer my son or daughter to marry a Catholic, Jew, Muslim or atheist? Paul advised Christians: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” (II Corinthians 6:14) The intrinsic intolerance of Christianity cannot be candy-coated.
Good deeds, in the bible, are almost always connected with heavenly reward, “God’s will,” avoiding punishment or with a missionary agenda. Most “Christian charity” is given to prove the superiority of Christianity or to win converts, not because human life is good, valuable and worthy of respect in its own right.
So, the Sabbath will be observed, even if God has to kill everyone to make it happen. Does this string of threats spew from a stable or loving mind?
God’s thirst for blood sacrifice is unparalleled, starting with Cain and Abel. Millions of animals were slaughtered to appease the anger and vanity of the Israelite deity. God even accepted a human sacrifice: Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:30-40). In II Samuel 21:1-14 the sacrifice of seven of Saul’s sons, who were hanged, caused God to be appeased.
God never denounces the institution of slavery. He encourages it.
God created evil (Isaiah 45:7) and hell. God blames everyone for Adam’s sin. God is partial to one race of people, which is racism. He gets jealous (Exodus 20:5) and, in fact, he says that his name is Jealousy: “For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” (Exodus 34:14)
In Ruth Green’s Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible, it takes 10 tightly typeset pages just to list briefly the killings of Jehovah. Is this the kind of character we would let our kids spend the day with? This sounds more like the stuff of a violent, X-rated movie than a guide for moral behavior.
Why did Jesus, the unrivaled moral example, never once speak out against slavery? Why did the loving, wise Son of God forget to mention that human bondage is a brutal institution? Why did he incorporate it into his teachings, as if it were the most natural thing in the world? I’ll tell you why: because he supported it.
