5 min readNov 5, 2019
- The Beethoven argument is not a red herring argument. I used it to illustrate that you can’t say that a book is a source of evidence. Evidence has to to exist outside of something. Ditto the Bible: You can’t say anything about the Bible is true or accurate simply because the Bible asserts that something is true or accurate. My point is solid. “Many of the world’s religions have creation stories that involve a supreme supernatural being who created the Earth.” That is true, and this is evidence that humanity’s capacity for imaginative thinking is boundless.
- Genesis anticipates nothing. It’s simply an account made by the writers of the time who didn’t know anything. A broken clock is right twice a day. If the writers of Genesis hit on something intuitive, it doesn’t mean anything more than that. We don’t need to “forgive” the ancient storytellers. My advice is to ignore them — or to just read these fictions as literature. Another point: If you had to undergo brain surgery, would you want your surgeon to rely on a medical text that was written in 1919? No, you would not. Same goes for the Bible. Why am I supposed to care that an ancient text may have hit on something correctly? As a product of history, the Bible is interesting. As a matter of knowing what’s valid and true in the 21st century, that is, with the amount of knowledge we’ve accumulated in the past two thousand or so years, the Bible is not interesting because it is woefully outdated and lacking in important now-commonplace facts about the nature of the world and the universe. Is there anything in the Bible about electricity or the germ theory of disease? Nope.
- We don’t know that science will find answers for everything. How did life emerge? We don’t know. We know how life flourishes and propagates. That’s called evolution. But as for life’s emergence, it’s possible we may never figure this out (though there are plenty of alluring hypotheses out there). Another: What caused the Big Bang? Nobody knows. We may never know. But any kind of inane religious comment to account for it brings nothing to the table.
- Oh, so Jesus might be a planet traveler, eh? Do you see what you’re doing here? It’s two things: a) You’re assuming that intelligent life on on other plants will assume human form (there is no zero reason to assume this) and b) you’ve taken another flight of fancy, imagining that Jesus can get around in the cosmos. Christianity is rooted in fictional ideas because it purports to make claims that have no basis in reality. Oh, a woman who never had semen enter her body was actually impregnated by some unseen supernatural being? It’s not that you and others believe this non-sense (deliberate hyphen for emphasis), it’s that you want to believe in a “virgin birth”. Why would anyone want to believe something that conflicts with what we know to be true about human beings and how they reproduce? “It’s a miracle!” is never an answer to anything.
- No god of any stripe and no “teachings” from any religious figure has anything to do with why we are moral creatures. Morality most certainly did evolve, and there is zero evidence that our moral impulses were given to us or injected into us from a far by some unseen celestial being. You may want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright to understand this.
- “Who knows that God has placed a soul in each and every blastocyst?” Gee, haven’t people been told for ages that “the soul enters at the moment of conception”? How does anyone know this? And why do people believe in souls when there is no evidence for them? Just for fun (I just discovered this moments ago), you can go to Wikipedia and look up “Ensoulment.” It appears that I’m mistaken in some regards, because history shows that there have been different beliefs about when the soul enters the body. But get this: It’s all make-believe! This Wikipedia entry on “Ensoulment” (it does look thorough and comprehensive; do see all the footnotes that will take you to many respectable sources) is about what people believe. What people believe, at least with regard to religious matters, is of no interest to me. I’m interested in what people know.
- “How do you know that the description in the Book of Revelation about Hell is utter fiction?” That’s easy to answer: The Bible is not a book of reportage where, in this case, someone went to Hell and then returned to write about it. “Hell” is a fictional place in exactly the same way Tolkien’s “Mordor” is a fictional place. A fun thought experiment that’s excellent for all sorts of religious claims: Without opening the Bible or without mentioning something that you know to be in the Bible, what is the evidence for Hell’s existence? There isn’t any.
- “God is not a sociopath in any sense of the definition of the term. We all deserve nothing less than His wrath, not for anything He has done, but for the crimes we have committed against Him.” Once again, this is nothing but a comment based on pure fiction. Why not direct your narrative and creative impulse toward something constructive like writing a novel or a screenplay? But to play along (all religious/theological thought is nothing more than playful thought), what “crimes against God”? Gee, this god character is certainly thin-skinned and ill-tempered. I thought God was the Big Kahuna of the Universe. Guess not. In the meantime, you may want to find a different fictional deity to worship.
- You wrote “Prove that this is fiction.” There’s no need for me to do that. You’re the one who is going on about this “Satan” character, so the onus is on you to support your claim that Satan exists. Once again (in a repeat of what I wrote above), without opening the Bible and without referencing something you know to already be in the Bible, what is the evidence for Satan’s existence? There isn’t any. How many times do I have to say this to believers? The 66 books of the The Bible don’t constitute a body of evidence for anything (I’m speaking specifically of its super-natural claims — deliberate hyphen again for emphasis). If there is evidence for Satan’s existence, this evidence would exist outside of the Bible (see my comment again about the Beethoven biography).
- Atheism is not a religion and ticks no boxes in the religious category. Not believing in something — in this case, gods — is not a religion. Religious beliefs involve attending a place of worship. I attend no such place. A religion involves reciting certain creeds. I do no such thing. Religious beliefs involve focusing on some individual (or belief in an unseen being) as a someone to direct prayers to and to venerate. I do no such thing. See? No ticked boxes. Yeah, atheists are searching for answers. We’re trying to figure out why the world has gone mad and why millions of people believe in bizarre and crazy things as if they were real. As to why I spend time on this subject, I’ll let Ricky Gervais answer:
