Tag Archives: Christianity

Christians’ Favourite Delusion 6: God guides our lives

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GodGuidesGod, Christians like to tell themselves, has a special plan for the individual believer’s life. This plan involves, amongst other things, directing them towards a specific career, making them successful, guiding them to the person they are to marry and showing them where they should live.

Here, for example, is some ‘guidance’ provided by Bible-Knowledge.com:

Remember – God already has your next new job all set up and planned out for you. All you have to do is simply wait for His timing to bring it to you!

As we might expect, there’s no biblical basis for this fantasy – neither Jesus nor Paul (or any other New Testament writer) mention it, which is why Christian teaching promoting the idea fails, without exception, to reference either of them. Far from being an individually tailored life-plan, God’s agenda, according to Jesus, is the same for everyone: it is to work tirelessly to bring about his Kingdom, loving your neighbour as yourself and God even more (Mark 12.28-34).

And that, once again, is that.

Or not quite, because Jesus goes further. Nothing else, he insists, compares with God’s Kingdom, the pearl of great price next to which everything else is without value or meaning (Matthew 13.45-46). So he demands over and over again that people abandon jobs, homes, spouses and family concerns to seek and work towards the Kingdom (Luke 12.27-37 etc).

Why would he change – reverse even – these priorities, the central core of his ‘earthly ministry’, to direct the careers and prescribe the domestic arrangements of Christians today? Answer: he wouldn’t, demonstrating just how much of a construct of their own imaginations is the Christ that Christians worship, profess to listen to and who, they maintain, guides the minutiae of their lives.

Another problem with Heaven

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HeavenEndNo Christians met last time’s challenge of showing us where the Bible says they’re going to Heaven when they die. Looks like they won’t be. Who knew.

Let’s say though that, despite the odds, they’re right after all; which of their ever-changing selves will be the one that makes it to ‘the other side’?

Does the Christian who passes away suffering from a dementia that has entirely dissolved his personality, his very self, find himself living for eternity in this condition?

Does a deceased child-convert find herself existing as a perpetual 9 year old?

What about all of those aborted foetuses many Christians feel so strongly about, maintaining that they too have souls; do they remain embryos for their heavenly existence?

Or does God change each arrival into the very best they could have been while on Earth? If he does, and everyone lives in their prime as, say, a permanent 28 year old, how much of who they really were and are survives in Heaven? It doesn’t sound like it can be very much.

Perhaps that’s why inviting dead believers to Heaven to live with him there has never been part of Jesus’ and his Father’s great plan.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 4: Heaven Awaits

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Heaven2Quite a few Christians are now following this blog and I’d like to issue them with a challenge: show me where Jesus or the gospel writers or St Paul or any of the New Testament authors promise you that you’ll go to Heaven when you die.

Because, you see, the Bible doesn’t make any such promise.

Jesus was adamant that ‘the righteous’ (he’s not even talking about Christians!) would soon transfer into God’s new Kingdom on Earth. When you say the Lord’s prayer, Christians, this is exactly what you’re asking for: ‘Thy Kingdom come – on Earth as it is Heaven.’ As the former bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, puts it, ‘at no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation’… in the first century, we might add.

Paul, with a version of Christianity that bears little resemblance to Jesus’ own, doesn’t teach that the believer will go to heaven either. In attempting to explain why the Kingdom is late in arriving – so late, in fact, that Christians were dying without seeing it – he invents the idea that the deceased will be woken up by Jesus when he returns to Earth (1 Thessalonians 4.14-16. And yes, he really did make up as he went along).

And after Paul? It was becoming increasingly apparent to later Christians that Jesus really wasn’t coming back any time soon. So they invented the idea that they would go to be with him. As Bart Ehrman puts it ‘with the passage of time, the apocalyptic notion of the resurrection of the body becomes transformed into the doctrine of the immortality of the soul’. But this is not what Jesus himself promised – and you’d think as ‘the Son of God’ he’d have known how it all worked – it’s not what St Paul taught and it’s not even what the trippy writer of Revelation claims. He too insists that everything is going to happen here on a recreated Earth (Revelation 21).

So the choice for you today, Christians, is whether you believe ‘God’s Word’ where, for once,  Jesus and Paul say much the same thing, or you go along with those later, post-biblical believers with their altogether different idea of what happens when we die.

Of course, you opt for the latter – even you have doubts that the Kingdom will come at this late stage – instead of facing the fact that when we die, we are just that: dead.

Ehrman D. Bart (2009) Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions of the Bible. Harper Collins: New York, page 266.

What use is religion?

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SavedI went to church on Sunday. Not because I wanted to, but to help someone out. It was an interesting experience. There were some really nice people there – good people even. They would say they were good… no, they wouldn’t, they would dispute they were good… they would say any good qualities they had were the result of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

But such a claim doesn’t account for all the other good people we encounter in life who don’t believe in Christ or the Holy Spirit or any of the other aspects of the Christian faith. It doesn’t account either for the mean-spirited, spiteful and obstructive folk that we find in churches. If Christians have been regenerated through faith in Christ – the Bible calls them ‘new creations’ in 2 Corinthians 5.17 – then there shouldn’t be any unpleasant, unloving folk in church, should there?

The minister on Sunday made much of Christians being ‘works in progress’, but this sounds like a nice way of making excuses for difficult people. Some folk manage to be good and loving without faith, without ever being a ‘work in progress’. A Christian commenter on another blog I read, ‘Why There Is No God‘, argued the other day that we shouldn’t judge a religion by the way its adherents behave. But what other way is there to judge it? If a religion doesn’t make individuals more loving – and this is what Jesus claims distinguishes his followers (John 13:35) – then of what use is it?

It seems to me – and I’m aware I’m resorting to personal experience here, mainly because there don’t appear to be any empirical studies of individuals pre- and post-conversion – that good people are good whichever side of the conversion experience they’re on, and hateful types are hateful whether they’re believers or not. Religion doesn’t, in spite of its claims, change people very much. At most it brings out their true natures. Much the same as alcohol, really.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 3: Jesus is Perfect

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buddyjesus1Jesus – practically perfect in every way.

Or was that Mary Poppins?

Christians go to great lengths to present Jesus as perfect. They do this by ignoring the evidence, such as we have it in the gospels, and by believing blindly in a false version of the god-man perpetrated by those who’ve gone before them. They call it ‘faith’; the rest of us know it as cognitive dissonance. Step out from behind it, look at the Biblical record without preconceptions and what you will see is that Jesus was an unmitigated disaster.

His prophecies were wrong, his promises untrue, his morality, as his followers demonstrate to this day, impossible. His mission, to herald the arrival of the Kingdom of God for the Jewish people, was a failure that led, ultimately, to untold evil being committed in his name. He was responsible for the stultification of mankind’s cultural and intellectual development, and, still today, the suppression of reason, autonomy and equality. The world would have been a better place if he had never lived, or at least if those who followed him hadn’t made a religion out of his failure. He believed that the root cause of illness was sin and demonic possession: he was uneducated and unsophisticated. He was inconsistent, unpleasant to those who opposed him and dismissive of those outside his own circle. He was arrogant, abusive and divisive.

He was, in all of this, thoroughly human. He was not God, nor the Son of God, and he was not delivering any divine salvation plan. He was a charismatic, Jewish fanatic from a superstitious backwater of the first century. He has, or should have, no more relevance to the lives of people today than any of the other itinerant preachers of the time. I say this not because I’m choosing to ‘reject’ him; in spite of the name of this blog he can no more be ‘rejected’ than other ‘divine’ figures like Mithras, Krishna and Superman. Nor do I say it because I want to revel in my own ‘sin’, as Christians assert of those of us who really don’t see what all the fuss is about. I say it because this is what the evidence shows us.

Read the synoptic gospels for yourself, ignoring the interpretive gloss invented by Paul and later Christians, and this flawed individual is the Jesus you’ll see.

New series: Christians’ favourite delusions!

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Number 1. My version of Christianity is the only true version

GodHates

It’s very easy for the believer to convince himself that his particular set of beliefs is the Absolute Truth and that this Truth needs defending from the ‘man-centred’ philosophies and heresies that threaten his false security. He is compelled to declare to the ever-contracting walls of his make-shift reality, ‘there’s only one Truth: mine!’

There are 34,000 different, distinct churches, groups and sects within Christianity, all claiming that they alone possess the absolute Truth. Their insistence that only their doctrines are based on ‘inerrant’ scripture demonstrates just how imprecise and wide-open to interpretation ‘God’s Word’ is. Take a look at Possessing The Treasure, Apprising Ministries and Slaughter Of The Sheep for a flavour of the delicious in-fighting. And don’t forget the Westboro Baptist Church, whose repellant views I’ve added to the picture above. These are, according to the church’s website, all Biblically based.

To the outsider, all Christian groups – from evangelicals and Roman Catholics, to Methodists and Baptists – differ very little. They all believe fantastic, unsubstantiated ideas so that their arguments between themselves are no different from disputes about whether the tooth-fairy wears a pink dress or a green one. What they don’t seem to realise is that it’s irrelevant what she wears when she doesn’t exist.

The one thing that all dissenting groups do appear to agree on, however, is that the more demanding and unpalatable aspects of Jesus’ teaching should be ignored. Instead of trashing each other, Christians might set about selling all they have and giving to the poor, just like their leader told them to. That, and not petty doctrinal squabbles loosely based on books of the Bible, many of which we know to be forged, would be real Christian living.

Jesus’ false promises

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I'llBeBackIf Jesus was the Son of God, or maybe God himself, as Christians like to claim, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see his promises come true.  After all, if God says he’ll do something, we should expect to see it happen… shouldn’t we?

The fact is, though, that so many of Jesus’ promises have turned out to be false. They haven’t materialised in the time-frame Jesus set for them. Here are just five that turned out to be a complete let down:

1) I’ll be back…

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels… I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom. (Matthew 16:27-28) 

Just in case we don’t get this the first time, he tells us again in Matthew 24:27, 30-31, 34 and Luke 21:27-28, 33-34, while ‘Saint’ Paul peddles the same nonsense in 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17 and 1 Corinthians 15.51-52. Did JC return with the angelic host for company to establish God’s kingdom on Earth before his disciples died? Nope,’fraid not.

2) Anything I can do…

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14.12)

Do we see Christians walking on water? Changing water into wine? Raising the dead? Doing feats even more remarkable than these? We should, if Jesus is telling the truth here. I guess the fact we don’t means this is another fib.

3) Ask and it’s yours…

I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. (John 14.13)

Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. (John 16.23)

Does he? When Christians ask of him, does he always provide what they ask, as he says he will here and again in Matthew 18.19? Absolutely not, which is why Christians like to tell us God’s answer to prayer is often ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ or ‘in a while’. But that’s not what Jesus says here; looks like he got it wrong again.

4) Signs and wonders…

These signs will accompany those who believe: …they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover’ (Mark 16.17).

Clearly, this why we’ve had no need for medicine or hospitals these last two thousand years. The Christians have been taking care of it all. Or perhaps not.

5) God will provide…

Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” But strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6.25-7.1)

Which is why true believers don’t need to go out to work to earn money to provide for themselves or their family. Everything they need, the good Lord provides – so long as they ‘strive’ for the kingdom, whatever that entails. Except no amount of chasing the Kingdom of God is going to manifest food and clothing. Jesus must know this because he acknowledges in Matthew 25 that there are people who are hungry, thirsty and without clothes. So why doesn’t God provide for them? It must be that they don’t strive strenuously enough for the Kingdom.

The gospels are full of these empty promises of Jesus’. He fails to deliver on every one, even for those who worship him as God. How would we react if a supposed friend lied to us as often as Jesus does? If we’d any sense, we’d recognise them as a fraud and a failure and send them packing.

Time to do the same to this old con-artist.

Why I could never be a Christian

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RidiculousIn Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll has the White Queen boast that in her youth she could believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’. Pfa! Only six? Today’s Christian can beat that with ease, and not only before breakfast!

To be a Christian you must accept through faith, and contrary to the evidence, that:

  • there is a reality above and beyond nature wherein exist angels, archangels, devils, demons, principalities (whatever they are), spirits (holy and otherwise) and God himself;

  • virgins can conceive and give birth;

  • a man who died 2,000 years ago is still alive;

  • this man could, when he lived, defy gravity; control the weather; sweat blood; reanimate corpses (his own included); pass through solid objects and project himself into space;

  • an intangible part of everyone survives death;

  • believing in a magic formula (‘Christ died for me’ or similar) leads to eternal life;

  • after death, believers will live again in an improved copy of the body they had when alive;

  • God reversed the laws on which the universe operates to make all of this possible, because he wanted to sacrifice a part of himself to himself;

  • he can do this because he is God;

  • he prompted men to explain his plan in a special book;

  • all you have to do to live forever is believe this book is true.

In addition to ‘essential’ beliefs like these, there are still more that Christians choose to accept on faith, add-ons that Christians are invited to see as the underpinning of ‘important’ doctrines. While not absolutely crucial, they are recommended as a means of adhering to (uncorroborated) biblical truth. Consequently, we find Christians who believe that:

  • God created the universe 6,000 years ago (because this is the time-scale that can be calculated from the Bible’s genealogies);

  • dinosaurs and humans co-existed (because this must be the case if the creation stories in Genesis are literally true);

  • evolution didn’t happen; God created the Earth and everything on it in just six days.

  • reality can be changed by the simple expedient of asking God to change it (prayer);

  • God directly controls the weather (omnipotence/divine irritability);

  • Jesus is coming back – with a selection of scenarios available to true believers about what this will be like (the second coming);

  • all unbelievers will be consigned to hell / oblivion / annihilation: again, take your pick (judgement).

There is not one scrap of evidence outside the special book that any of these items of faith are true. None is verifiable, and consequently none has ever been verified (accounts written inter-dependently fifty years after the alleged miracle-man lived don’t count).

There is, on the other hand, overwhelming evidence that virgins don’t conceive; that there is no agency behind the weather and natural disasters; that nothing of an individual’s self survives death and that dead bodies stay dead. This has always been the case and always will be. It was how nature operated two thousand years ago when all of the ‘essential’ items of faith, invented by the kinds of mind that believed earthquakes and floods were deliberate acts of God, were gaining currency.

Though I once did, I can’t subscribe to any of these ridiculously ‘impossible things’ in the vain hope that I might live forever.

Can you?

And another three things…

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Following on from last time’s post, here, below the picture, are some more points I hold to be true.Image

Human behaviour, not sin.
There is no such thing as sin and we don’t need God’s forgiveness for it. Sin is a Christian construct with no purchase in the real world. There is only human behaviour – good, bad and indifferent. Most of it is indifferent (or neutral if you like) including what consenting adults may do with each other sexually. Some of it is good, in the sense that it benefits others significantly; some of it is bad – evil even – because of the harm it causes others. None of it is offensive to God, because there isn’t a God, and none of it is forgiven by him for the same reason. We are moral or not, without the assistance of a God. This seems to me to be self-evident: if there is no God and yet we are capable of behaving morally then any goodness cannot come from him. Similarly, immoral behaviour, of which the religious are as capable as the rest of us, is also entirely human.

We can draw two conclusions from this:

  1. No sin = nothing to be saved from = no redemption.

  2. The Christian claim that because atheists don’t acknowledge God they have no grounds for behaving morally is demonstrably false. The golden rule of ‘do unto others…’ is of value to us as social animals, which is why it pre-dates Jesus by millennia. Non-believers are as capable of behaving morally as believers, and sometimes a darn-sight better.

It is impossible to know the future.
No-one can know the future. The same Christians who castigate scientists for not being there when the Earth came into existence, have the temerity to claim they know what will happen at some indeterminate time in the future. There will be, they tell us, an anti-Christ, a rapture and Jesus will return from Heaven. They cannot know this of course, even if their holy book seems to predict it. It too was created by human beings with no more ability to read the future as anyone else. People have long wished they could tell what the future holds, which is why fortune tellers, astrologers, priests who read auspices, oracles and prophets have been with us throughout history. They’ve never been right, except by chance, for the simple expedient that humans are not gifted with accurate foresight. Biblical prophecies are no exception and have already failed, as we’ll see in future postings.

(Scientists do of course predict what the consequences of certain actions might be, but scientific predictions are subject to amendment as more information becomes available and are always open to refutation. They are not in the same category as prophecies purportedly from a deity who doesn’t actually exist.)

We are all humanists.
We are all utterly reliant on other human beings, not God, to help us fulfil our needs. Believers do not turn to God when they are hungry, because if they did they would starve (in spite of what Jesus says in Matthew 6.25). They don’t turn to him when they are ill, but look to medical science to help them (yes, there are a small minority of extremists who, because of faith in God and the likes of Mark 16.18, let their children die. But most believers don’t; they have faith in other humans, in science and technology). Christians and believers of all stripes demonstrate their faith, not in God but in human endeavours every time they get dressed, put on spectacles, catch a bus, board a plane, buy a house, switch on a computer, television or oven, use a phone, listen to music, admire art and marvel at architecture. None of this is God-given, it is all human, and believers, whatever else they may claim, are all humanists at heart, having far more faith in the human than the divine.

My creed (sort of)

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Image

I was asked recently by a good Christian friend, now I’m no longer a believer myself, what I ‘place my faith in’ these days. Despite the claim from some Christians – Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis, for example – that atheism itself is a religion, we atheists generally don’t have ‘faith’ in anything; we are much more interested in knowing, in evidence and in not accepting on trust whatever self-appointed authorities might tell us. Nor do we have ‘faith’ in the ‘goodness’ of man as Christian Voice’s Stephen Green tells me we do. Though we might recognise that the only way to solve the many problems we face is going to be through human endeavour; there is no god who is going to bail us out.

So in these liberating post-Christian days, my world-view differs from my friend’s and other believers’ in a number of crucial ways. This post looks at the first three of these and there’ll be three more next time. Together, these make up something of a creed for me, even if some, like these first three, are expressed as negatives:-

There are no supernatural beings.

There is no empirical evidence that supernatural beings exist. There is, however, plenty of evidence that such ‘beings’ are the creations of the human imagination. It follows from this that are no fairies, ghosts, demons, spirits (holy and otherwise), angels, Santa Claus, Satan, Zeus, Osiris, Baal, Allah, Yahweh, resurrected Christ, or God of any sort ‘out there’.

And, no, books written by human beings are not evidence of the external, independent existence of any of these characters. Such inventions bring us back squarely into the realm of the human imagination.

Neither, as Romans 1:20 claims, is the natural, physical universe evidence of a supernatural realm. To argue that it is is the same as saying that because there is an Athens there must be a Zeus, or that the existence of tea-shops proves Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot must really be orbiting the sun. That which is material, visible and natural can never be proof of something that is invisible, immaterial and supernatural. And in the end, there is no difference between something that is invisible, immaterial, supernatural and unprovable – and that which is non-existent.

Faith is no substitute for evidence (and wishful thinking doesn’t work).

Declarations, statements and views that begin ‘I believe’ are suspect and not to be trusted. They usually mean the person uttering them has no evidence for their belief. Otherwise, why believe? Wouldn’t you ‘know’ if you had evidence? ‘Believing’ does not make the object of your belief a reality. ‘Believing’ that you have eternal life won’t enable you to live forever. Hoping you’re going to Heaven when you die doesn’t mean heaven exists nor will it get you there in the future. Having ‘faith’ in Jesus will not make you right with God for all sorts of reasons. In short, wishful thinking doesn’t work.

Science, not religion, offers the best explanations of life, the universe and everything.

Religionists (wilfully?) misunderstand the scientific use of the word ‘theory’; they insist it is a synonym for guesswork or argue that because some scientific theories, like evolution, cannot be replicated in the laboratory they are therefore null and void (see Answers in Genesis again with its battle cry of ‘were you there [when the world was made]?’ No, and neither was Ken Ham, nor the writers of Genesis, nor any deity; see above). But a scientific theory offers an explanation which can be tested against observable phenomena and processes. It asks ‘is this what we might expect if the theory (explanation) is accurate?’ If yes, the theory is validated, repeatedly. If no, the theory has to be modified to fit the facts or completely reformulated, again so it accurately mirrors what is observed. The scientific principle of actively seeking out evidence that might refute a given theory, or aspects of it, ensures a process that can be trusted. Note though, that having such trust in science is not a matter of faith: it is about considering the evidence and developing knowledge from it.