Reading Time: 4 minutes At some point during our merry journey through secularism, we all encounter some benighted religious people who incredulously ask: “If you don’t believe in a god, where does your morality come from?” Religious people believe that the source of their morality is their god and that their religious belief is the exercise of that morality. […]
bible
Posted inDeep Dive
To the Christian rich: Your Jesus would like a word
Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the most peculiar if on-brand developments in American Christianity is the rise of the prosperity gospel movement. The champions of the prosperity gospel believe that god will reward with health and money anyone who donates to the champions of the prosperity gospel. I re-phrased this for cynical purposes, but not by much. John […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
To forgive or not to forgive
Reading Time: 9 minutes Raised Roman Catholic, I was indoctrinated in childhood with the idea that forgiveness is a cardinal duty of faith, which then saddled me with knee-jerk guilt whenever I failed to bestow it. But as I think objectively about this moral ethos many decades later, I’m unconvinced it’s essential for human harmony and contentment. In fact, […]
Posted inReligion
Yet more Bible reboots
Reading Time: 5 minutes Consider some more reboots: After Adam, Noah, and Abraham, we get Moses and then Jesus. And maybe the story continues to reboot.
Posted inReligion
The Bible story reboots
Reading Time: 3 minutes Let’s look at the repeated story lines in which God makes an everlasting covenant with his people. There’s a The End, and then the story lurches forward with another reboot.
Posted inReligion
God would not have permitted an evolving Christianity
Reading Time: 4 minutes Christianity has changed. Its canon of books has changed, its doctrines have changed, and the Bible itself records changes to the story such as the character of God.
Posted inReligion
Christianity offers little more than deist arguments
Reading Time: 3 minutes The moral argument. The cosmological argument. The transcendental argument. These are all deist arguments, which don’t argue for a god who interacts with his creation.
Posted inReligion
Christians lie to cover up God’s support for slavery
Reading Time: 4 minutes What’s the key issue about the slavery in the Bible? Is it that there are different kinds of slavery, indentured servitude and chattel slavery, or is it that God supported both?
Posted inReligion
Isaac Newton and the Bible
Reading Time: 3 minutes Isaac Newton’s famous Principia Mathematica was a foundational contribution to modern science. Compare it to the Bible. Guess which one is full of contradictions, errors, and immoral demands.
Posted inReligion
Christianity is so confusing it needs encyclopedias of defenses
Reading Time: 3 minutes There’s a book called “The Big Book of Bible Difficulties” and plenty more like it. No god worthy of the title would allow his message to be so confusing that it needed such help.