Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.

I recently received a reply to my piece ‘I am a Militant Atheist’ over at Plasma Pool. Since I neither have the time to address these trite sneers nor the patience for the commenter’s snark, I’m posting a quick run through of his post here, with my immediate thoughts.

“I am not the least surprise [sic] that he launched an attack on the Bible; it’s an old political trick – assassinate your opponent’s character in order that you can appear credible.”

Nonsense. Non-Catholic Christians justify their beliefs all the time with the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s their premise, and if you successfully challenge it — which any half-wit can do — you challenge every assumption they make thereupon.

“He has not submitted any credible evidence to prove the non-existence of God outside of his aberrant views of the Bible.”

This really pisses me off — when people declare that it’s my obligation to debunk their belief structure.

First off, a bunch of them unabashedly admit at the outset that there’s nothing I could do to change their minds, so you might as well stop the discussion there. And second, they’re the ones making the positive claim about the way the world is! The burden of proof is on them. If they can’t produce a single scrap of evidence for these grandiose claims they’re making about the metaphysical structure of existence, I’m under no obligation to take them seriously, or treat them with deference.

Really, I don’t have time to run around disproving every stupid idea everyone has ever had. If you want to believe there’s a bearded man in the sky who cares what gives you a boner, or that there’s some cosmic soul-soup that we all return to when we die, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that warrants the slightest bit of respect in public discourse when the best evidence you can drudge up is a bronze age book of fairy tales.

“The Bible and Christianity have laid down their propositions. Where is his?”

Here’s my proposition: the world really is as simple as it seems. If you can’t touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it, see it or perceive it with the extended senses given to us by science and mathematics, it just doesn’t exist.

“Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before.”

By what gauge do you make this assertion? Christian faith is — and has been — on the decline in the US.

Church attendance is on a 70 year decline (just since Gallup began tracking, so likely longer than that).

And then there’s Europe, which was formerly the most Christian place on the planet. I don’t think Jesus freaks are rallying a major comeback anytime soon over there.

“May the story of Madelene O’hare [sic] be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy [sic].”

So what? Her kid’s a preacher. Unless he turned lead into gold on national television, or predicted the exact time and location of some unexpected stellar event, or shit, did anything that couldn’t have just happened anyway it’s not a miracle.

This essay is in response to an article found at Plasma Pool, and is cross posted.

I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too many people who would avoid topics of import for fear of confrontation.

From their response to my essay, it is apparent that their respective faiths are more nuanced and malleable than many today. Their appreciation for science is admirable, and their brand of belief is almost entirely unobjectionable to me. To be sure, if every believer comported himself as they do, I would likely not be complaining. However most believers do not. Moreover, I firmly believe that most believers cannot and will not. So the question becomes: knowing that a certain amount of extremism invariably accompanies any system of religious irrationalism, do the handful of benefits we gain from religion outweigh its negative aspects? I submit that they do not.

While I reject the claim that “lead[ing] fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe … is not a realistic vision for everyone,” I do not seek to provide a manifesto for the abolition of religion, or even advocate it per se. It is my goal to explore the issue at hand, and at most, propose a new standard of discourse to which rationalists can hold themselves.

I shall begin by addressing the contention that religion and science are exclusive spheres of inquiry, which can peacefully coexist. Steven Jay Gould, in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, provides a name for this line of argument: the Non-Overlapping Magisteria principle, or NOMA. Gould is of the view that science and religion occupy different realms of human experience — what he calls magisteria — the former being primarily concerned with material observation, and the latter, with the immaterial. He maintains that they do not in principle, and therefore should not in practice, say anything about each other.

For the discerning believer, it is quite possible that these magisteria do not overlap. However, for most people, they do — quite frequently in fact. Practical Christian doctrine* makes many material claims about the world, which science can test. For example, that a man could live inside a whale, that rabbits chew cud, that placing striped sticks in front of breeding livestock will cause them to bear striped young, that the world was flooded 5000 years ago, and that we are all descended from one family who survived that flood. Central to Christian doctrine is the belief that a virgin can conceive, that the sick can be healed by sorcery, and that a cold corpse can spring to life. Material claims, all. So excuse me, but it appears your magisterium is overlapping.

Granted, one who is committed to the principle of NOMA, as Finley and Hilke may be, should be willing to reject these intrusions, or admit that they are figurative or allegorical stories. However, if you surrender the only substantive claims a religion makes, you must also admit that you are only left with the issues for which you can offer no more insight than I: the existence of an afterlife and/or universal morality. Here we are on equal footing, so I find it wildly and offensively presumptuous that the religious would declare knowledge of the unknowable. Frankly, there is no reason any one of these fantasies should trump another — they are all at their core masturbatory, self-aggrandizing hallucinations. But if it feels good, and it isn’t hurting anyone, why can’t I do it? My reflexive response is that you can’t build a healthy worldview on a platform of lies and delusions, but why not, if it engenders no palpable menace?

This leads me to a question Finley and Hilke raise, a rebuttal commonly heard from apologists: if I keep it to myself, who does it hurt? I tend to agree with this position; I have no right to tell you what you may believe on the most personal level. But my concern is that religion isn’t content to remain personal, it inevitably jumps the boundary from personal to interpersonal. Before their essay is through, Finley and Hilke manage to praise religion as a “source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction.” Tell me, of what use is a rule if it others cannot be held to it?

Religion as Moral Code is a common criticism thrown in the face of atheists, and it needs refutation. Morality is a societal construct, and it exists regardless of spiritual dangling carrots, or threats of eternal punishment. Ethical codes are arguably the most remarkable development of human society, but there is no need to build them an altar, so to speak. This seems to me as nonsensical as an obsessive compulsive who believes unspeakable harm will befall him if he fails to turn the doorknob thrice before leaving the house. We know his ritual has nothing to do with his continuing safety, yet he is too afraid to break free of the habit. Allow me to rephrase this argument as a question, if god were disproved tomorrow, would you take to stealing VCRs and raping indiscriminately? If yes, please stop reading this and head to the nearest psychiatrist. If no, fear of god is not the root of morality.

In fact, those who believe are usually less well behaved than those who do not. It is well attested that, besides drug or alcohol abuse, religiosity is the best indicator that a father will abuse his children, that prison populations are more or less entirely composed of believers, that conservative Christians are more likely to divorce than atheists, and that religious states generally consume more pornography; the state with the biggest appetite being Utah. If “moralizing force” is to be entered as evidence in a debate about the benefit of religious belief, it would seem to fall squarely in the stack of reasons not to believe.

Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke will be reminded that their understanding of religion is privileged. Liberal theology is acquired, appreciation for science and evidence, instilled. It’s only through education and higher thought that fundamentalism is beaten back^†. Again, if all the religious believed as they do, I would have nothing to protest — I’m not in principle opposed to people stoking warm fantasies about what happens after death; even less so should they admit readily that their beliefs are indeed such. However, delusion, like fire, is not easily contained: some of us may be able to admire it safely behind the hearth, but others will surely be less vigilant, and it will consume them.

Exemplifying such imminently dangerous delusion is the fact that a majority in the US believes that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. As Sam Harris says, there are people in this country who, upon turning on the television and seeing Israel replaced by ball of fire, could not help but see a silver lining. Is this fatalism not dangerous? Is not the belief that this world will be destroyed and most of its inhabitants incinerated for eternity a severe impediment to forging respect for nature and human life? This is not a perversion of the Christian faith, this is an outgrowth of the irrationalism inherent to it. Finley and Hilke may try to distance themselves from this manifestation of belief, but I ask: if so much effort must be spent on getting the right interpretation of religion, why bother at all? Are murder, genocide, racial/sexual oppression, or, worst of all, a self-fulfilled prophesy of global annihilation acceptable risks to take to maintain a gelt belief in the supernatural?

This is all, admittedly, grossly hyperbolic, but in the last century alone we have seen numerous atrocities spring forth from the fetid loins of faith: suicide bombings, abortion clinic murders, Muslim sectarians drilling holes in one another’s heads, mass suicides, armed standoffs, continuing genital mutilation of infant boys and young girls, car bombings in Ireland, a protracted bloodbath in Kashmir, to name a few. All of these issue directly from religious conflict. If we should be so daring as to frame larger issues, like the Western conflict with the Middle East, or the holocaust — arguably the culmination of a millennium of ecclesiastically endorsed anti-Semitism — in religious terms, the cost we have paid for these fantasies becomes staggering.

Perhaps these terrible consequences only arise when the religion is abused. However it remains true that religion is a powerfully addictive drug. Its method of action: hallucination. Symptoms of overdose: persistent delusion, accompanied by sadistic, homicidal, and/or suicidal impulses. Most users manage to curb their dependency — these are the ‘functionally religious.’ But as with any dangerous drug, we do not just leave it to the judicious to espouse moderate usage.

To be clear, I do not advocate anything so radical as the illegalization of religion, this is obviously not a practical solution. I am merely insistent that belief be stripped of its privileged place in our discourse. Automatic deference towards someone else’s worldview is dangerous. As history has demonstrated, faith often becomes infested by other delusions. If we allow it a bulwark against the forces of rationality, what sinister miscreants might amass therebehind, scheming to lay waste to the prosperity of the age of reason? Abominations that might otherwise be apprehended and extirpated.

It remains the case that we do not need religion to be happy or good to one another. Consequently, as long as we can point to a single instance of harm caused by this edifice — and there is no shortage — any moral supplement, sense of community, or impetus for charitability that it educes is simply not worth it. Our collective unwillingness to wean ourselves from the belesioned teat of this monster does not constitute an argument to continue suckling.

* I use Christianity as an example only because it is the religion with which I am most familiar.

† Interestingly, in the United States, the expansion of science over the past century has been paralleled by the expansion of biblical literalism, which before the turn of the 20th century was quite rare. I submit that this is a kind of defensive posturing on the part of the religious; as science encroaches on their turf, they push back full force, with ever more furious delusion. I suspect this tide of loony will retreat in time, as it has done in other developed societies.

This is a continuation of a previous post, in which I lay out my reasons for rejecting the a creationist god. Here I’d like to briefly address another problem I have with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God.

Scientific progress has sequestered modern Christians into a very narrow interpretation of god’s role in the universe — compared with the role he played in, let’s say, the first millennium. God is no longer the architect of the celestial spheres, he is a cosmic watchmaker, and he has stepped back to let his creation run its course. He rarely interferes.

However, the bible tells us of times when god did interact with man. What happened on these occasions? Well, in Genesis he is bested by a snake and two people successfully hide from him (3:5,3:9). Later on, he tells a man to build a boat, so he can flood the entire world, because he thinks that is the best way to destroy evil (Genesis 7:4). Some time after that, he gives us what are ostensibly the most important laws in the universe…carved on rocks (Exodus 20). Too bad the guy he gave them to lost his temper and broke them, so god made him carve them again (Exodus 32). Skip forward a bit, and he makes a wager with the devil about torturing a man (Job 1:9-12). Finally, the last time he really did anything of import, he nailed himself to cross, and cried out to himself “Why [have I] forsaken [myself]” (Matthew 27:46). And then he entreated himself to forgive us, because we know not what we do (Luke 23:34). Can you see where I am going with this?

These are supposedly the actions of the creator of the universe: the most powerful, intelligent entity we can conceive of. And these are the ways he chooses to interact with his creation. Why didn’t he just strike all the evildoers dead, instead of drowning the entire world? It was surely in his power. Why didn’t he carve his commandments in diamond, or titanium, or better still, burn them into the back of our hands? Why is his final redeeming act to mankind so morbid and nonsensical?

If these are the works of the Ultimate Creator, it’s tragic that they are not examples of divine perfection, supreme logic, mind-blowing power, and universal comprehensibility. Instead, his whole plan is foiled by two hungry naked fuckers, and in order to save them from the punishment he devised, he has to torture himself to death.

I’m sorry, I just can’t swallow that.

Lately, I have stumbled across some weird people calling themselves Christians. First it was the Christian Atheists, who believe worship and ritual are beneficial for the psyche, but that there is no god. Yeah, real good for the soul, just like plopping down in front of an empty fireplace with a hot cup of nothing, and cozying up inside a lack of blanket to read your favorite air novel.

Then there’s this guy Justin Cannon, who set up a Christian dating site … for gays. They call themselves, ‘Rainbow Christians’. Why do these people go through such odd contortions to keep hold of their faith?

I suppose the latter example is at least encouraging evidence that,  in some circles,  the bible is gaining a more moderate and tolerant interpretation. But in my opinion, they should go for the gold and call it the fairytale that it is.

Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.

Here, I thought Rick Warren was going to be nothing but an embarrassment at the invocation. Turns out, his prayer was a great addition to the ceremony: classy, elegant, touching. Reminiscent of the Christians of old.

What was I worried about? Silly me.

h/t Pharyngula

Quick observation about the nature of god.

In his divine plan, he has condemned mankind to a life of hardship, misery, disease, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately death. But he/Jesus someday plans to ride in to the rescue (on a white horse, pulling a sword out of his throat, wearing a bunch of crowns, with his name written on the inside of his leg in invisible ink, and all the rest of that bad acid trip bullshit in Revelation), and he will make everything better.

Well, if you were watching a kitten suffer with a thorn in its paw, would you pull it out? I would.

But would you consider me a bad person if I waited a while, letting the poor little guy mew and squeal, knowing full well that I could help it at any time, but refusing to? I think, and you would probably agree that the virtuous thing to do would be to put an end to the cat’s suffering. Apparently though, that virtue is not a godly one, and although we generally equate godliness with virtue, this is one instance where the two don’t match up: the godly thing to do is to prolong the suffering of the innocent.

The only retort I can see Christians making, is the whole “god has a plan” cop-out.

What this amounts to is saying “we can not apply the rules of logic to the goings on of the universe, because what god does makes no sense to human minds.”

I would like to point out two problems with this argument. The first is that it directly contradicts one motivation for being faithful, which is that believing in god actually explains something. Creationists simultaneously claim that observing the natural world provides us with incontrovertible evidence of his existence, and that human rationality cannot be applied to the movements of the creator. WTF STFU?

The second problem is that if there’s anything that history has taught us, it’s that humans are impressively adept at figuring out how god’s hand influences the universe. Today we are nailing down the details of quantum mechanics, molecular biology, multi-dimensional calculus etc. In fact, over the ages, god has become progressively feebler, as we have learned that germs cause disease, not evil-spirits or divine punishment. We have learned that the universe as it stands today pretty much takes care of itself, and that we don’t need an invisible scarab to roll the sun across the sky, or a series of animals standing on each others’ backs to carry the earth through the cosmos. It’s painfully obvious that the god of today is impotent compared with the god of old, because the things he was invoked to explain have been sufficiently explained without him. He is vestigial: once useful, but now merely a reminder of how far we’ve come.

House Resolution 847
In the House of Representatives, U. S.,
December 11, 2007.

Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;

Whereas there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population;

Whereas there are approximately 2,000,000,000 Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population;

Whereas Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;

Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its Judeo-Christian roots;

Whereas on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ;

Whereas for Christians, Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God’s redemption, mercy, and Grace; and

Whereas many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world, celebrate Christmas as a time to serve others: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.

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“With the We Like Christians Resolution of 2007, Congress hereby decrees that it likes Christians.

Although this may not effect any offical change in the governance of the United States pursuant to the First Amendment of the Constitution, we nonetheless find it prudent to run out the clock writing completely worthless and borderline illegal legislation.

On the agenda for tomorrow:

1. Adding to the congressional rubber band ball
2. Counting the tiles in the Capitol Dome ceiling
3. Heads up 7up

4. Something to do with taxes, or terrorism (if time allows)”

I am a militant Atheist.

There is no god, and if you are religious, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I, nor anyone else in my experience, has ever been witness to a miracle, a supernatural event, or anything unclassifiable as either banal, or a hallucination.

Believe it or not, I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending – of finding ever smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for god to occupy. As I learned about the world, he retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” However, my independence was hard won, and I often wished I could have spared myself the torturous process of self-emancipation, and jumped right to the conclusion.

Even today, I wish there were something in the bible that was demonstrably false, so as to discredit the Judeo-Christian god in his own terms. If only we could catch the bible with its pants down, so to speak, making a claim that no sensible person could rationalize their way out of.

Well, as it turns out, there are indeed such passages. Matthew 4:8, for example:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor”

The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any 3rd grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.

They usually begin by conceding that it is a metaphor, and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient god, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably make it his highest order of business to make a universally interpretable work.

They also might try to invoke some backstory that is necessary to interpret the verse properly, like when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment in Matthew 19:24:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

They try to explain this away by saying that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Nevermind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor if that were indeed true, but if Jesus were god as they claim, he would surely be aware that this could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.

We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, they are usually lurking right at the surface – to find them, you only have to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very story of Jesus.

Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status, since the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was born of a virgin. If that isn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here, Christians do make some desperate flailings to explain that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side, but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not Mary, as proof of Jesus’ ‘Christhood’.

But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. I forget who said it, and I am surely paraphrasing, but it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, as is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism.

People have been trying this excuse for centuries, I’m sure, and it has only worked once. Hell, I’m sure Bristol Palin tried it, but even Sarah (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) didn’t fall for it.

However, if you analyze the bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of writing in such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, the authors were trying to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids, Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”

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In the end, it is not that hard to knock a leg out from under Christianity, or at least point out that it is just another man-made scam – like Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them. Couldn’t one be right? Not likely.

The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else. Which brings us to another question: why is it the lamentable case that religion is so ubiquitous?

Well frankly, faith offers powerful solace against death, which is probably one reason it is so ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. We, unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when death is imminent, must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear.

While our consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to ensure its own existence, and soon it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.

Some have hypothesized that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a by-product of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey got hijacked by “sacrifice a goat on the full moon, or the rains won’t come,” or “cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises, or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may be very well be because our brains still treat it as a life or death issue, regardless of how silly it is.

One of the odd facts of religious silliness is that the longer it stays around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit. What we atheists need to do (I am assuming that I have successfully effaced any faith you may have had, and that you’re now with me on this one…), is build up sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population – in America, ten times the number of Jews – but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.

We need to call people out when the make stupid assertions, like that god should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is the kind of thing that we should consider contemptible, dangerous, irrational, juvenile, and such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’ “conversational intolerance,” and when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by god, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”

We need to encourage a new kind of discourse – one of critical thought and challenging dogma: of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because its characterized by ongoing self criticism and reevaluation, while religious fundamentalism thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.

I have made the observation from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.

We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines dogma as follows:

“ ‘Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ ”

These are exactly the rules we must refuse to play by.

If we slowly chip away at this edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually, although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end may bring, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.