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

by Dan Barker

Hitler’s gas ovens were horrendous and the suffering was unspeakable, but they did not burn forever. The murdered victims of the Holocaust suffer no more, but the victims of God’s anger will scream forever and ever.

Any system of thought or any religion that contains such a threat of physical violence is morally bankrupt. For this reason alone, Jesus deserves to be denounced as a tyrant.

Not all churches were actively pro-slavery, but those that were found little difficulty supporting slavery with scripture.

Somebody tell Bruno, Servetus and other victims of the Catholic Inquisition and Protestant Reformation that the bible is a morally superior book.

One of the most damaging ideas in the bible is the concept of a Lord and Master. The loftiest biblical principles are obedience, submission and faith, rather than reason, intelligence and human values. Worshippers become humble servants of a dictator, expected to kneel before this king, lord, master, god—giving adoring praise and taking orders.

The master/slave relationship has become so ingrained in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim world that independent thinkers are considered heretical, evil rebels.

Jesus considered that human beings are cogs in someone else’s machine, be it God’s or Caesar’s. This goes against the grain of a modern representative society. It is not moral to be told to submit to a Caesar or to a god.

The first four commandments are religious edicts, not moral guidelines. They have nothing to do with ethics or how we should treat each other. They certainly have no official place in a country that “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

True morality is being able to weigh and compare the relative merits of the consequences of one action against another. It is flexible. The bible, on the other hand, makes absolute statements without admitting the possibility of ethical dilemmas.

So the Ten Commandments are composed of four religious edicts that have nothing to do with ethics, three one-dimensional prohibitions that are irrelevant to modern law, and three shallow absolutes that are useful but certainly not unique to the Judeo-Christian system. Any one of us could easily come up with a more sensible, thorough and ethical code for human behavior.

Although phrased positively, the Golden Rule does not give any positive guidance. It does not say, “Do kind things, peaceful things, compassionate things to others.” The negative version, on the other hand, allows people to be left alone. It rightly recognizes the essence of morality: try to minimize harm.

Some Christians feel that “love your enemy” is so unnatural, so nonintuitive, so shockingly different, that it elevates Jesus to a whole new level of compassion. But I think it is actually less moral than our natural human instincts. There are some enemies who ought not to be loved. Some enemies should be hated. If love is just a blanket imperative that ignores the qualities of its object, then it becomes meaningless.

Love can’t be commanded. No one has the right to tell me to love someone else. I can treat people with fairness. I can give respect where respect is due. But I can’t just turn on love.

The Beatitudes are immature: “If you kids will stop fighting and pay attention to me, I’ll take you to the movies.” Since they give little behavioral advice, stressing inner attitudes of being, they sometimes are called the “be-attitudes” by preachers. (Not the “do-attitudes.”) They are fluff. Offering skimpy moral guidance, they turn out to be mere platitudes to keep the poor and disenfranchised content to stay in their place. They are not good guides for behavior.

Many Christians claim that the genocide of idolaters is permitted because “God knows best.” But every murderer feels some kind of justification for the crime. Why is God special? Why should a deity get away with atrocities that would send you or me straight to prison?

If Moses had not existed would it have never occurred to us that murder is immoral? Without “The Law” would we all be wandering around like little gods, stealing, raping and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended?

It is wrong to kill, even according to the bible. And since the biblical god and his followers were murderers, the bible is contradictory.

They believe that if there is no god, then there is no accountability. Since human nature, they insist, is intrinsically corrupt (look at history or current headlines), the tendency will be toward destruction and evil unless there are strict laws and absolute enforcement. We are rambunctious children who need to be broken like wild horses, or reined in and controlled by our wise parents. The fear of punishment and the loss of parental approval provide the necessary moral imperative.

there is no great mystery to morality. Although a few extreme ethical dilemmas might arise in one’s lifetime, basic day-to-day morality is a simple matter of kindness, respect and reason.

Just because Jesus was considered a Higher Power does not make his alleged suffering any higher than yours or mine.

There is no big mystery to morality. Morality is simply acting with the intention to minimize harm. Since harm is natural, its avoidance is a material exercise.

Without the Ten Commandments, would it never have dawned on the human race that there is a problem with killing? Prohibitions against homicide and theft existed millennia before the Israelite story of Moses coming down from Sinai.

Championing the “consent of the governed” over the authority of a sovereign, the Declaration of Independence is unabashedly anti-biblical.

In this theistic universe, morality is severed from reality and reduced to flattering the Sovereign.

Jesus incorporated slavery into his parables as if it were the most natural order, only cautioning masters to beat some slaves less severely than others (Luke 12:46-47).

Jefferson thought that most of Jesus’ words were insulting, although he spotted a few good teachings that were as “easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” (To John Adams, October 1813)

“I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.” (Mein Kampf) Hitler credited Jesus as his inspiration.

The creationist Hitler shared a thirst for blood with the bombastic biblical God in whose “image” he thought he was created.

If the bible gives us absolute moral guidance, then where is it? Why don’t sincere believers agree on these important questions? It’s clear that the bible is an inadequate behavioral guide, and that the tyrannical god of Scriptural mythology leads us to a lack of values.

When Jefferson wrote about the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, he was not talking about the Christian god. As a Deist, he viewed the “Creator” as a much less personal being than the biblical deity. The god of Deism was more like “nature” than “Jehovah.”

Since “god” has never been defined, much less proved, its “image” can’t be used as a basis for anything. “Nature,” on the other hand, means something.

But evolution is not blind chance. It is design that incorporates randomness—not intelligent design, but design by the laws of nature, by the limited number of ways atoms interact mathematically and molecules combine geometrically.

The randomness of genetic variation is a strength of evolution, providing a greater chance that something will survive.

Evolution shows how complexity arises from simplicity. Creationism can’t do that. Creationism tries to explain complexity with more complexity, which only replaces one mystery with another mystery.

It wasn’t faith that eradicated smallpox. Contemplating the “image of god” will not cure cancer or AIDS.

Any ideology that makes its point by threatening violence is morally bankrupt.

Anyone who believes in hell is at heart not moral at all.

If the only way you can be forced to be kind to others is by the threat of hell, that shows how little you think of yourself. If the only way you can be motivated to be kind to others is by the promise of heaven, that shows how little you think of others.

For almost two millennia, the bible has been producing a most “uncertain sound.” The problem is not with human limitations. The problem is the bible itself. People who are free of theological bias notice that the bible contains hundreds of discrepancies.

I figured that Christian scholars had already done the homework and that our faith rested on a firm historical foundation, and that if I ever needed to look it up I could turn to some book somewhere for the facts.

I am now convinced that the Jesus story is a combination of myth and legend, mixed with a little bit of real history unrelated to Jesus. Here’s what I found out: 1. There is no external historical confirmation for the New Testament stories. 2. The New Testament stories are internally contradictory. 3. There are natural explanations for the origin of the Jesus legend. 4. The miracle reports make the story unhistorical.

The lack of contemporary corroboration does not disprove his existence, of course, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who supposedly had a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.

Philo might be considered the investigative reporter of his day. He was there on location during the early first century, talking with people who should have remembered or at least heard the stories, observing, taking notes, documenting. He reported nothing about Jesus.

Justus of Tiberius who was a native of Galilee, the homeland of Jesus. He wrote a history covering the time when Christ supposedly lived. This history is now lost, but a ninth-century Christian scholar named Photius had read it and wrote: “He [Justus] makes not the least mention of the appearance of Christ, of what things happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did.”

Many are convinced that the entire paragraph is a forgery, an interpolation inserted by Christians at a later time. There are at least seven reasons for this:

absent from early copies

does not appear in Origen’s second-century version of Josephus, in Origen Contra Celsum, where Origen fiercely defended Christianity ...

never once used this ...

the Josephus paragraph about Jesus does not appear at all until the beginning of the fourth century, at the time of Constantine.

Eusebius once wrote that it was a permissible “medicine” for historians to create fictions—prompting historian Jacob Burckhardt to call Eusebius “the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity.”