Hey! Look! The Tibetan Book of the Dead!

Right here!

Or, maybe it'd behoove me [you've never seen me in hooves] to do this:

Watch out for this mistake

From a review of All About “Heaven”: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, by Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion correspondent

...[T]here is an unthinking "respect" automatically accorded to religious ideas that throttles our ability to think clearly about these questions. Miller's book – after being a useful exposition of these ideas – swiftly turns itself into a depressing illustration of this. She describes herself as a "professional sceptic", but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from? These questions are considered obvious when we are asking about any set of ideas, except when it comes to religion, when they are considered to be a slap in the face.

Of course there's plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful – but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most six-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller – and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority – refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my current account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.

"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees – a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith" – but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.

Yup

Believers need to grapple with this

Why I am no longer a Christian.

My comment spammer reminded me of something

A week ago last Sunday pastor Paul did a great sermon on The Prodigal Son. He based it on something he read by a guy who did an anthropological study by going around the Middle East telling New Testament stories to Arabs and Jews who'd never heard them and carefully noting their reactions.

After church, I said to my family, "You know, if the whole Bible were like that story, I'd have no trouble with it." Then I discovered that I had to repeat the whole sermon for the benefit of those who were in the room with me, but weren't listening.

Jeez Louise.

[Speaking of Jeez Louise, I just corrected a couple of typos that made it past my editing efforts.]

Here's a good quote, from a guy named Nathan:

Even if we take the premise that atheism is religion, if you're going to call atheism a cult then you must logically, implicitly admit that all religion consists of cults. But then the starting premise ultimately leads to the realm of nihilism, a self-detonating position.

Religion is about the bigoted, prejudicial thinking that dismisses the lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary in favor of a given position.

Atheism is accepting the lack of evidence and considering evidence to the contrary. You couldn't get more opposite than that.

It's in response to this video by Richard Dawkins:



Another commenter brings up Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." You can find that on line here.

I mentioned a while back that I enjoy a good heresy now and then

They used to call these people Devil Worshippers. They seem to be sweeping some things under the rug in this article.

All sorts o' fun stuff here.

Against my better judgment,

so to speak, I'm going to post this link to Vincent Cheung's Christian Apologetics site because I think Christians need to argue their point better than they do. Of course, there's still an awful lot of this sort of thing going on there,

but he's better than the rest.

George H. Smith doesn't get quoted enough on the web

So, to rectify that, here are a couple paragraphs from the end (pp. 322-323 of the soft-cover, 1989) of Atheism: The Case Against God, which I'm pretty sure is the best book on the subject:

To be moral, according to Jesus, man must shackle his reason. He must force himself to believe that which he cannot understand. He must suppress, in the name of morality, any doubts that surface in his mind. he must regard as a mark of excellence an unwillingness to subject religious beliefs to critical examination. Less criticism leads to more faith - and faith, Jesus declares, is the hall mark of virtue. Indeed, "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18.3). Children, after all, will believe almost anything.

The psychological impact of this doctrine is devastating. To divorce morality from truth is to turn man's reason against himself. Reason, as the faculty by with man comprehends reality and exercises control over his environment, is the basic requirement of self-esteem. To the extent tat a man believes that his mind is a potential enemy, that it may lead to the "evils" of question-asking and criticism, he will feel the need for intellectual passivity--to deliberately sabotage his mind in the name of virtue. Reason becomes a vice, something to be feared, and man finds that his worst enemy is his own capacity to think and question. One can scarcely imagine a more effective way to introduce perpetual conflict into man's consciousness and thereby produce a host of neurotic symptoms.

Religion breeds corruption?

Take a look at this study: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look, by Gregory S. Paul.

And here's a newsreport about it:

What was it Hemingway said?

When you get writers block, just sit down and write the truest thing you can think of. Something like that.

Last Wednesday I went to a Secular Organizations for Sobriety meeting. The internet misinformed me about their start time, so I got there after the festivities were over. So we just introduced ourselves and I listened to them talk about the local drugstores and boating on the Mississippi.

It was worth it. They seem like a helluva group of guys. I'll be going back tomorrow.

I just kind of lost patience with the Christian bias of AA. I love the people there - they're loving, caring and wise - but I don't agree with them on a couple of fundamental points. 1. I don't believe in the supernatural, and 2. I don't believe in selflessness.

Christianity was a better religion

once upon a time.

Of course I've already talked about William Wilberforce.

Those were some ministers of the Gospel of Peace.

Anybody who watches this and doesn't bitch about it

is going straight to Hell!

OK. The twelvth chapter of Romans

has an awful lot to believe in.

OTOH: OMG! Take Deuteronomy 23:1 and apply it to your life:

He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.

In case you don't get the euphemisms, the other versions available there will make it clear for you.

I suppose you're wondering what's got me bouncing around the Holy Scriptures this evening. Well, tonight it's this guy.

My problem with God is

he wrote a crappy book. No matter which book you think he wrote, it sucks. The Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita...if you don't cherry pick what you think is good out of them you'll be paralyzed with indecision trying to follow all of their respective commandments. Those are the books I've read the most of; the first and last I read cover to cover. The Surangama Sutra didn't seem to be going anywhere as far as "What should I do?" The same with the Koran.

I think what this guy says is pretty telling, and applies to the lot:

Ask yourself this simple question: Why, when you read the Bible, are you not left in awe? Why doesn't a book written by an omniscient being leave you with a sense of wonder and amazement? If you are reading a book written by the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator of the universe, wouldn't you expect to be stunned by the brilliance, the clarity and the wisdom of the author? Would you not expect each new page to intoxicate you with its incredible prose and its spectacular insight? Wouldn't you expect the author to tell us things that scientists have not been able to discover yet?

Yet, when we open the Bible and actually read it, we find it is nothing like that at all. Instead of leaving us in awe, it leaves us dumbfounded by all of the nonsense and backwardness that it contains. If you read what the Bible actually says, you find that the Bible is ridiculous. The examples shown above barely scratch the surface of the Bible's numerous problems. If we are honest with ourselves, it is obvious that an "all-knowing" God had absolutely nothing to do with this book.

The reason why the Bible contains so much nonsense is because God is imaginary. The Bible is a book written thousands of years ago by primitive men. A book that advocates senseless murder, slavery and the oppression of women has no place in our society today.

Update: I should say that I've only glanced at the Book of Mormon. That's why I didn't answer your last comment here, T.F. I didn't mean to ignore you.

Yeah, I've heard that one too...

[This is a fun site]

You can find many believers who will say, "The reason why scientific experiments fail to detect God is because God must remain hidden. He does not answer prayers if he knows that he will be detected."

In order to see the truth, you need to accept that this explanation is silly. If God must remain hidden, then he cannot answer any prayers. Any "answered prayer" would expose God.

The whole notion that "God" must remain "hidden" is a total cross-threading of religious doctrine. On the one hand, believers will say that "God wrote the Bible, God incarnated himself and died on the cross for us, and God answers millions of prayers on earth every day." Then in the next breath they will say, "God must remain hidden." God obviously cannot "remain hidden" and "incarnate himself." These two items are mutually exclusive. Therefore, the explanation that "God must remain hidden" is impossible. As soon as you accept how impossible it is, you can begin to see see that God is imaginary.

From the same author

as the blog from which I clipped a comment in the previous post: "Ecclesiastes is by far the best book in the Bible. Of course most of the good stuff contradicts what the Bible says elsewhere."

His lists of "good stuff" are very well chosen.

Btw, this isn't on one of those lists, but if I'd noticed this verse months ago I wonder where I'd be now:

Galatians 23:13 And now as ye have been delivered by the power of God out of these bonds; yea, even out of the hands of king Noah and his people, and also from the bonds of iniquity, even so I desire that ye should stand fast in this liberty wherewith ye have been made free, and that ye trust no man to be a king over you.

Here's something interesting

In a comment on this article

Paul said...
What I find strange, is that it seems fashionable now for athiests [sic] to pronounce moral judgements on Bible events. Strange because these debates predominate in cultures which have been built on the Judeo Christian ethic in the first place. In other words, the origin of the morals used to judge the Bible came from the Bible in the first place.

As a christian - am I concerned about the 42 "children" ripped apart by bears and seemingly justified by God? Well, put it this way - as my tiny nation (NZ) rapidly departs from its biblical belief system 18 thousand tiny, defenceless children were ripped apart in their mothers' wombs last year (up from 11,000 in 1990). Which do you think I'd be more concerned about? 42 dead "children" justified by God or 18,000 justified by athiests?

You tell me - as my country rids itself of the shackles of what you think is such a barbaric book, shouldn't it become less barbaric? Believe me - all the statistics (including violence against and murder of children) are running the other way. How do you explain that? Look at countries that ban(ned) the Bible... notice an increase in justice and equity as they did? No. Actually the opposite is true. Two or three from last century come to mind.

If you gut the Bible of its major theme, yes, many incidents appear barbaric and make for great blog reading for those who don't want to digest the actual book. But doesn't any book deserve to be read in its context?

The Bible reveals a titanic struggle between good and evil for the stupendously precious souls of men and women. From the Bible's viewpoint the eternal destiny of every soul, loved by God, hangs in the balance.

The Bible contains many warnings (Matt 10:28). How loving would God be if He wrote a book which demonstrated no consequences for disobedience or wilful choice to defy Him, when such disobedience and defiance, if not turned from, would result in the eternal destruction of the soul?

Sat Nov 10, 06:10:00 AM 2007

And yet the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being could change it all with less effort that it takes me to blink.

Original Sin! Now there's scientific proof of it!

I learned first about the University of Nottingham (isn't that appropriate) research from the Mises Institute, and now Kevin Hogan has beaten me to the punch on a follow up article. I should have know he'd be on it like a chicken on a june bug.

Kevin does a pretty good job expressing himself, but I've got to warn you, he hasn't read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But I'll by-pass that issue and quote what he quotes:

"Anti-social punishment was rare in the most democratic societies and very common otherwise.

"Using the World Democracy Audit evaluation of countries' performance in political rights, civil liberties, press freedom and corruption, the top six performers among the countries studied were also in the lowest seven for anti-social punishment. These were the USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Switzerland."

He adds: "Their results suggest that the success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of 'naked self-interest' is radically incorrect."

Adapted from materials provided by University of Nottingham, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

University of Nottingham (2008, March 6). Cooperation, Punishment And Revenge In Economics And Society. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 7, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/03/080306183134.htm

The latter items in italics are Kevin's sources.

To see what I mean by "original sin," read how Kevin introduces the study. But, actually, I was keyed to my own analysis by the Mises Institute article Does Neuroscience Support Austrian Theory?

Oh! Crap! That's not the one that mentions the Nottingham Study. It is, however, very much the one that stimulated my thoughts as a matter important to my project of synthesizing the theories of Lutheranism, Objectivism and Libertarianism. I mentally filed (but, unfortunately, didn't physically file) the Nottingham study as evidence for my contention that Original Sin is, basically, the tendency to blame someone else for our own failings.

What did Eve do after she ate the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? She blame the serpent. What did Adam do when he was caught? He blamed Eve. Did Cain shoulder the responibility for murdering Abel? He certainly shouldered the consequences, but I never read that he apologized.

Blaming somebody else and then stealing what they had a right to; that's the whole story of the Old Testament. The New Testament is saying, "Stop that crap! Right here! Right now!"

That's why I'm unwilling to let go of Christianity. It may be that we're carrying the "forgive and forget" message too far - or we think we should, and our history proves that we haven't carried it far enough - but it's a message that the world is literally dying to hear! And it's done wonders for Western Civilization.