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Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?

Theocracy? No Thanks

Will Momma be Blonde in Heaven?

Is Sex With Animals Always Wrong?

Atheism and Marriage

Petition to the gods

Christianity and the Death of Civilization

Is Equality Possible?

Indecent Exposure

How not to be eaten by aliens

Allah's Alibi

Free Pornography

USA and Israel

St George, the big pussy cat and Richard the Lionheart

Atheist Christmas

Does God Bless America?

Kill the Puppy Dogs

Debate Unlimited is Bigger Than Jesus

Blinding Faith

The Future Does Not Suck

The Devil Hypothesis

Why do you assume that I would not be able to recognize a god if I met one? I have a great capacity to accept new information and change my views accordingly. You can't deduce that I am stubborn and closed minded simply from my refusal to accept the nonsense that you accept. I am wide open to persuasion based on real evidence, I am just strongly resistant to accepting superstitions and the stale hearsay of religions. Scripture is not evidence. Scripture is just words in a book, in the case of Jewish scripture it is words in a book copied from a translation of a book copied from another language and passed through several different hands some of whom have a proven record of falsification and all of whom are thoroughly biased about its source and significance.

How many of the dozen or so current claimed incarnations of Jesus Christ have you gone to meet?

Can I assume that the answer is none? How can you be so careless when the fate of your soul is at stake? You don't believe them, do you? You don't believe that God walks the Earth in modern times despite you believing that he will come again. What is so special about the time of Jesus that makes it credible that God would walk the Earth at that time but not this time?

Of course Jesus fulfilled all the prophesies didn't he? Including the one about riding a donkey and the foal of a donkey, at the same time. The reason why the story of Jesus appears to fulfil prophesies is that it was written that way. It is literally impossible for the gospels to be reliable testimony because they are full of contradictions and at the same time also full of clear evidence of plagiarism. They make very unreliable witnesses. If the story they were recounting was basic history it would be possible to work out which bits were likely to be true and which bits were not but unfortunately the story of Jesus is meant to be believed literally and to be beyond the range of the usual academic tools employed by students of history and literature. If you do ever read the Bible as literature, as a work that you are allowed to understand and analyse, you will find that the usual Christian interpretations are flights of fancy.

I have recently read the whole Bible, cover to cover, in sequence. It is something I strongly recommend that everybody who is remotely interested in religion as a human phenomenon does once in a lifetime. Once is quite enough.

I suggest people do what I did. Read the thing from front to back. No messing about jumping from one part to another, and read it all in sequence. While reading it be aware of who wrote it and when. God didn't write a single word, it was all written by men, by men who thought that they knew God. When read in sequence a number of things become clear:-

1] In the earliest days the Hebrew people believed that other gods were real and existed

2] Not until the time of Daniel, very late in the story, is there any hint at all that any Jews believed there was anything at all after death or that there was anything which you might call a soul. People were bodies and God's favour was shown by keeping the body going and procreating for absurd lengths of time. While Enoch is never listed among the dead and Elijah makes his excuses and leaves none of the other people mentioned in the vast bulk of the Bible are ever talked about as going to heaven, waiting in the grave or having any kind of a life after their death. Anybody with a suspicious mind would think that the idea of an afterlife was something the Jews learned about in Babylon, along with talking animals having multiple heads that strictly belong to other animals.

3] Whatever the purpose of killing and cremating animals at the temple might have been there is not the slightest hint that it anything to do with saving grandpa from an eternity of post-death torture by a spirit that looks suspiciously like the god Pan, who comes from a place the Hebrews didn't know existed until they were conquered by its legions. The Hebrews had prophets: who knew?

4] Only after the Babylonian captivity is over do the Jews learn the meaning of numbers, every large number before that time is

to be regarded as being as less reliable than the material broadcast by Saddam Hussein's minister of propaganda. If there were that many Hebrews under arms they would have taken over the entire known world (to the Hebrews at the time the known world finished at Greece, the Caucasus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Persia and parts of Arabia.). Also if the numbers claimed to have been offered up in sacrifice were genuine it is a wonder that sheep didn't go extinct. Somebody of a suspicious mind might even suggest that numbers were routinely inflated in the retelling before being committed to the page at a much later date.

5] The unchanging God changes quite regularly in the story. In Eden he hasn't learned the trick of omnipresence or omnipotence. In the later part of Genesis and the rest of the Books of Moses (including the account the Big M writes of his own funeral) God is a real hands-on type of boss regularly showing up in person, visible to thousands and working spectacular miracles on a regular basis. Later on he gets significantly more reticent about making personal appearances anywhere except inside the skulls of authorized prophets. In the New Testament God stops bestowing his favours in the form of long life and wealth and instead starts offering places in heaven, a place previously reserved for off-duty angels.

100 years after my death there will be plenty of evidence for my existence in the form of photographs, documents, records of my birth, baptism, confirmation, my degree and other qualifications. It is probable also that there will be archives of my writings preserved. I will also be cross-referenced in many other records and archives. People leave traces these days. In countries where most people cannot read and very few ever write anything things are very different. Thirty years after a man has died there are no traces only echoes of stories. In the case of men who have been reported to have started a rebellion or built a palace a historian has no particular reason to be wary of source material which dates from several decades after the death of the individual concerned because it is usually easy to understand what bias the account may have. But accounts of miracle workers are completely different. There is no way in which a historian can be unbiased about accounts of the supernatural, the historical record is full of accounts which we know are extremely unlikely to be true, all a good historian can do is relay the information given and suggest that discretion is advised. Dismissing and forgetting all accounts which are fantastic in nature is a bad idea because sometimes later discoveries can throw new light on them. For example stories of one eyed monsters and giant man-eating birds encountered by brave seafarers don't look quite so baseless once remains of pygmy elephants are found on Mediterranean islands. If you were to come face to face with a skull of an unknown animal which had a large brain and a mysterious big hole in the front of it wouldn't your mind turn to thoughts of one-eyed monsters and the fastest route back to your ship? Similarly it is likely that Elephant Birds were still extant on Madagascar when the first Arab explorers arrived by sea. A bird that is taller than an ostrich and as slender and graceful as a carthorse would make quite an impression on a wary traveller even if he didn't hang around long enough to find out what it ate. Sometimes survival is more important than curiosity.

Archaeology does not back up the story of the Bible very well. There is not the slightest trace of the Hebrews being in Egypt or wandering in Sinai for forty years. While there has been archaeological evidence for King David his existence has always been taken as read, or at least it has been taken for granted that it is reasonable to assume that there was a king who did kingly things that his sycophantic courtiers blew up into something considerably bigger. He wasn't exactly Darth Vader, he wasn't reported as doing anything especially amazing except for the myth about Goliath and nobody is going to hold their breath until a giant's skeleton is unearthed. Egyptian records don't report any Pharaohs lost in battle in circumstances which suggest parallels with the biblical account and flood archaeology is as academically respectable as phrenology.

I know I have a mind and I can't prove it. I assume you have one too but there is no evidence for it, I just operate on that working hypothesis. Christians often seem very weak on the concepts of logic so I will take this slowly. There are indeed things which we know to be true which we cannot prove, but not many. Most of the things we know are true we can prove. So I will happily concede that something may be true which cannot be proved. This does not mean that anything you want to claim to be true that cannot be disproved is now shown to be true. If you are having trouble with that idea it helps to change the people and the assertions and see what happens. You can't prove that you have a mind, that does nothing to prove or disprove the existence of a conspiracy to hide alien contact or the Yeti. All we have managed to do is to show that not everything that is true can be proven. If you can describe something logically the thing must either exist or not exist. Describing something does not make the thing exist, only its description is caused to exist. Postulating and describing a god does not make that god exist in reality it just creates a mental model of the thing in just the same way as thinking up some new thing such as a hexagonal igloo made up of purple explosive cucumbers. I will assume that I am the first person ever to imagine such a thing and now you are the second. I can't prove to you that such an igloo does not exist. If I could show it to you I could prove that it did exist, but I imagine that it would take me a while to make one but a hell of a lot longer to find one.

I believe that Zeus does not exist. I assume you do too. Neither of us can prove it and neither of us is worried that we can't or is afraid that it might be true. I am not worried about your god existing and it matters not one jot how wonderful you describe heaven to be or how hideous you describe hell to be because I don't believe in the concept of gods or a soul. With no soul there can be no afterlife. I don't believe in a soul and you can't scare me into believing in a concept which seems utterly farcical. I have no reason to believe that consciousness is ever possible without a functional brain.

All the experience I have of life says that if you drug a brain you get drugged consciousness, if a brain goes to sleep so does consciousness and if a brain is damaged by trauma, old age, surgery or degenerative wasting then the personality changes as well exactly as if all our experiences, feelings and thoughts were caused by electrical and chemical activity in our brains. Why is that concept so hard to grasp? When we didn't have brains we didn't experience anything. When we were tiny our experiences were simple and sensational (made up of sensations, not words). Nothing in my experience fails to fit with the “I am a brain” hypothesis, the soul hypothesis doesn't explain anything at all. If I am a soul why did I fade away to no sensations and thoughts at all when I was put under general anaesthetic? How can a chemical in my bloodstream switch my soul off? Surely the brain hypothesis makes far more sense than the soul hypothesis.

What purpose does a soul perform? Why would any god want to make humans with an immortal bit inside them? For what possible benefit? The reason that souls were invented was to get around the problem of priests being so easy to kill. What is the point of keep on feeding priests when they do no useful work? Souls are the answer to this problem. Make a man believe that he survives death and you've got a hold over him. But once the soul has been invented people have to have faith in it. You can't get the other guy to have a belief in a soul while you know it's just a convenient fiction to allow you to have some influence over him. He will only believe you if you seem convinced, and the best way of seeming convinced is to convince yourself and use faith: the magic by which you make something true to you by believing in it as an act of will. With enough repetitions of the act of will you change the shape of your brain so that the thing feels true. Suicide bombers sincerely believe they are doing the will of Allah and they will be in Paradise that same day. People can be made to believe almost anything. At least you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. However faith cannot work for ever on a whole population. People will have doubts, if they raise them they can spread. There's nothing as beautiful as the spreading of doubt. Faith kills people, doubt sets them free.

I am not afraid of being dead, I just don't want to die because I enjoy being alive. The idea of being dead is absurd. Death is ceasing to be.

I am not afraid of Christians I just have better things to do with my time than repeat the same old arguments again and again so I try to discourage the unoriginal and slow of thinking.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

So you're still threatening me with fire and damnation are you? ... means hell-fire and damnation in Christianspeak. The ever-loving Jesus who only asks us to believe in him will forgive stealing, fornicating, murder, rape and corruption but will not ever stand for somebody not believing in a fantastic story and will have no choice but to see us tortured for all eternity. Please explain to me how this works. Explain why God and/or Jesus needs to act this way. Explain why humanity has to be partially immortal and where that immortal bit comes from before we are born. Explain why justice, retribution and the revelation of the true nature of God and existence has to wait until after death. Feel free to write a clear and coherent answer.

I would also be interested in your explanation as to why a death row prisoner with a room temperature IQ can find Jesus in his heart when he knows his name but monks who have sat cross-legged for centuries in the Himalayas trying to tune into the ultimate reality of the universe never pick up so much as a blip of static from Radio Jesus. Why is this god of yours so shy? No formal introduction, no contact at all. That's very strange behaviour for a being that seems so talkative to so many half-wits.

I have no fear of your fairy story whatsoever. The scared are those in the church on their knees, not those outside it living their lives, use some elementary logic here! Why are you afraid of my doubt? Do you honestly think it is only belief in retribution after death that makes people behave morally? How do you explain my morality, or do you just assume I can't be moral?

Why do only certain people get to converse with God? Has he not got the power to make everybody hear him? Has he not got the intelligence to work out that many will never believe hearsay stories without evidence? Why does he regard gullibility as the supreme virtue? What does a god gain by being believed in? If a god gained something where would he put it and what would he use it for?

What makes you think I'm afraid? You have to think there's something wrong with me otherwise you'd be imagining your ever-loving god torturing me for all eternity for no good reason and that thought would conflict with your central faith that God is good.

You haven't demonstrated any spiritual understanding or discernment at all. You have just picked a fight and run away pretending to have won. You haven't addressed any of my points.

Are you suggesting that it's God's job to make me believe in him? That makes my lack of belief his failure. Isn't that heresy? Is your faith all about believing what you want to believe or is it about believing the eternal truths which have been handed down to you to accept without question?

Will you ever give any answers or are you just content, not to say smug, in your ignorant faith?

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited