How Religion Muddles Along Because it Doesn't Have Any Evidence to Go By

Are Christian souls gendered?

In a fascinating analysis of how the Christian notion of the 'soul' evolved to suit local political needs and to pander to popular demand, Professor Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland, explains how Christian ideas about the soul have changed since the notion was adopted from the Greek Platonists in the late second century CE, the idea of an immortal soul being absent from both the Old and New Testaments. Until then, Christians had used the Hebrew notion of a human being a single entity composed of both spiritual and physical parts.

For 'spiritual' parts read 'magic ingredient' making it alive. In fact we can see remnants of the lack of belief in immortality in verses such as this The following bible verses that seem to have escaped the editors' notice and been included in the modern editions.

From the Old Testament from a time when ideas of God's omniscience hadn't formed and death was seen as the end:

Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

Job 14:1-12:

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So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them.

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.

Ecclesiastes 9:1-5:

Clearly, the idea that it didn't matter how you lived your life as it made no different in the long run, was not what the church authorities needed the masses to believe. What they needed was the ability to promise a reward for good behaviour, unquestioning obedience and compliance with dogma, which the dead couldn't complain about and couldn't report back to the living and reveal that it was a false promise and what they'd been sold was a pig in a poke.

So, the idea of an immortal soul was pinched from the Greek Platonists and inserted into Christianity, complete with the idea that the soul doesn't have a gender.

The following article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original may be read here:

Talibangelical News - False Prophets For Trump Getting it Wrong Again

Jeff Jansen, False Prophet
Global Fire Ministries International

‘Prophet’ Jeff Jansen Says Trump Will Be Back in Office by June | Right Wing Watch

Either God is very bad at predicting events, or his self-declared 'prophets', like the hapless Jeff Jansen, are lying about what God said to them.

Having guaranteed, on the word of God as revealed to him, that Trump would win in November 2020, Jansen is now, like the others who gave the same God-given assurance, frantically trying to present that 'prophesy' as accurate, even though it plainly wasn't. One of the ways he does this is by telling his dupes that Trump did win really, but the election was stolen (God, apparently lacking the power to prevent that theft, or allowed it for some ulterior reason, other than making his chosen 'prophets' look like incompetent liars and frauds, too stupid to know you should never make a prophesy that can fail, like that old fraud Harold Camping did some years ago).

False Prophets make False prophesies

Trump will be back by end of April, definitely! Guaranteed. Would I lie to you?

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... Er... no! Scrub that! It'll be June! Got that? June, not April! Okay? Definitely end of June! Guaranteed! God sez!

So, having been cheated of his (God's that is) victory, God is now going to reverse that result and install Trump in the White House - any day now, real soon - you'll see!

Originally God told Jansen to tell his dupes er... followers that he would do it no later than the end of April...

When April came to an end and there was no sign of Trump being installed by a military coup like Jansen prophesied, he realised God must have meant June when he said April, so Jansen has now had to tell his dupes er... credulous dupes, that things have been delayed but God will definitely have Trump back in the White House and confirmed as rightful president by the end of June.

Maybe by the end of 2021, Jansen will be announcing that his first prophesies got the year wrong and it'll be April (or is it June?) 2022 when the military intervene and put Trump back. And the world-wide 'dancing in the street' has just been delayed - as though the rest of the world is just hanging on Jansen's word and gives a toss how Americans chose their president.

But then Jansen's little god has the same level of parochial ignorance as Jansen and his gullible dupes... er loyal fools have, it seems, and thinks the only events of any importance or interest to the rest of the world all happen in America.

[Biden is] not our president! He is not, nor will he ever be. Everybody knows there was a red tidal wave, there was a Red Sea moment, which is a red tidal wave. And quite frankly, America voted in Donald J. Trump.

We will be rejoicing in the streets by March, April, May, June. There’s going to be an amazing turnaround. You just watch what happens. And the world will rejoice. Not just America, the world will rejoice because of this exposure. I’m telling you that’s going to take place. I’m going down with the ship on this. The Lord showed me this.

Jeff Jansen - False Prophet and raving loon.
Global Fire Ministries International
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA

Jansen seems to have other worries, apart from people realising he's just a false prophet grifter, blowing hot air for money. He also seems concerned that they might think he's "turned effeminate, almost homosexual", so he needs to be a big tough man to prove he hasn't. Back in mid-April Jansen issued a new interpretation of the pacifism Christians have claimed to believe in because Jesus told them to turn the other cheek and forgive their enemies.

He announced that Jesus was a tough guy who wouldn't hesitate to use violence, and the church has "turned effeminate, almost homosexual" so he has told all the ushers in his church to carry guns and kill anyone who even thinks of 'trying something'. He says he's told them:

Listen, guys, if I’m up there preaching and somebody comes up running, make sure you get them. Just kill ’em. Just shoot ’em dead.

In other words, if you're late, don't run up to Jeff Jansen's church; you won't make it through the door alive. His heavies will gun you down like a dog to prove Jeff Janson isn't even a little bit homosexual and not at all effeminate.

So, from now on, any Chritian who doesn't carry a gun and who doesn't think it's right to kill people who 'try something', is officially, "effeminate, almost homosexual", according to God's own (false) prophet, Jeff Jansen.

And gullible people still send these frauds money so they can live in a style of which their dupes er... victims can only dream.

Islam is not the Problem. Faith is the Problem!

The grotesque random slaughter of innocent people, including young children, in the name of Islam, in Britain, France and Afghanistan by Muslim fanatics, and the equally grotesque murders of innocent Norwegians by the Christian fanatic, Anders Breivik a few years ago are the results not of Islam or Christianity; they are the result of faith.

They are the result of people arrogating for themselves the right to determine who can live and who should die, based on nothing but faith and the belief faith gives them certain knowledge of what a god wants, who it wants to punish - and that it requires their help in meting out that punishment.

It would be easy to condemn the deluded, simple-minded fools who carried out these acts as 'evil'; as representative of an inherently 'evil' religion or the products of inherently evil cultures, but that would be missing the point entirely.

The problem is not Islam; the problem is not Christianity. The problem is faith.

Blame The Victim - Girl Killed By (Lack Of) Faith!

Woman Dies after Prophet Puts Heavy Speaker on Her Body to Demonstrate a Miracle

In a neat demonstration of a fundamental Christian principle, allegedly taught personally by Jesus to his followers, a South African Christian 'prophet' killed one of his congregation - a young girl - because she didn't have enough faith.

Or that was his excuse anyway - an excuse provided by Jesus no less. The principle being demonstrated was the one Christians often cite, claiming that with enough faith you can move mountains, even though a mountain has never been seen to be moved by faith alone.

Faith Is A Feminist Issue

In the concluding chapter, Freedom to Choose, in my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It,I point out the following after reproducing an extract from http://www.allaboutgod.com/ which spells out in minute detail the role of both husband and wife in a marriage accordign to Christian dogma:

Note the entire ‘justification’ for men declaring the role of women, and for abrogating to themselves the right to do so with no reference to women’s opinions. It is wholly and solely that they can find excuses for it in a book of highly dubious provenance, which some people assert is the inspired word of an invisible magic man for which there is not an iota of definitive evidence.

The stories in the Bible were written by people with a Late Bronze Age Middle Eastern tribal misogyny who saw women as goods, not people. The cultural norms, prejudices and assumptions in that society are expected to be appropriate for today and half the world’s population are expected to meekly comply, because some men say so – and they have a book they can blame.

A Crisis of Faith

The phenomenon of the 'crisis of faith' is curious. Theology must be the only academic discipline where practitioners regularly have severe doubt about their subject being real. A 'crisis of faith' should more properly called an intrusion of reality, as common sense tries to take over and allow reality in.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It,dealing with this curious phenomenon that seems to be an occupational hazard in clerical circles.

There is probably a very good evolutionary explanation for the tendency to check the evidence before making a life or death decision. Those who did not check had a greatly reduced likelihood of passing on their genes, so the genes for not bothering about evidence would tend to lose out in competition with their counterparts which regarded evidence as important.

So, when it comes to life and death decisions in real life, normal people not only rely on evidence but look for it and regard it as the best available basis for the decision. Importantly, they regard absence of evidence of cars as perfectly reliable evidence of the absence of cars. Why would they not? What would be the purpose of looking for evidence then regarding its presence or absence as evidence of the same thing?

My New Book! Ten Reason To Lose Faith

Faith is a fallacy!

Faith is delusionary. It produces the illusion of knowledge and certainty in the absence of real knowledge and understanding.

Faith is not a virtue; it is the sin of intellectual indolence and the abdication of personal responsibility. It is pretending to know things you do not know. It has failed mankind and now represents a clear and present danger, not just to humanity but to life on Earth itself.

Ten Reasons to Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It, looks at the reasons why people should reject faith and why a 'crisis of faith' is not a problem to be avoided but something that should be welcomed and encouraged because it represents a mind trying to come to terms with reality. A 'crisis of faith' is a triumph of reason and the starting point for personal liberation.

Recent events in Pakistan, Turkey, Paris and Belgium can leave little doubt that faith, far from being the basis of a kind, caring and peaceful society, is harmful to the point of being positively dangerous. Religions which once might have produced united, cohesive societies in relative isolation, now produce ghettoised, mutually suspicious, warring and uncompromising factions in an increasingly globalised, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith world where exactly the opposite is needed.

Why Science Grows And Religions Stagnate

A couple of interesting articles in the science literature this week showing how science works and why it ultimately corrects it errors, whether because of mistaken claims or deliberately false ones, and above all why it continues to grow and develop. I wonder if any keen theologists can cite examples of religions being extended and kept on track by a similar process.

The first, in Scientific American, concerns the recent announcement of the detection of evidence of gravity waves as predicted by the inflation model of the Big Bang. This model explains a great deal about the observable universe such as why widely separated areas of the Universe that could never have been in contact with one another given the limitations imposed by the velocity of light, appear broadly the same. However, inflation remained a hypothesis pending definitive evidence supported only by the fact of its mathematical elegance and that it explained what can be observed.

Then last March, as reported in this blog and elsewhere a team working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment at the South Pole announced that they had found the evidence in the form of gravity waves, or more precisely, evidence for gravity waves; the smoking gun of inflation.

Now, however, and in the finest traditions of a major discovery, some serious questions are being asked and as yet not being fully answered. Doubts have been expressed about the validity of the conclusions from the data which the team have not yet made available for public scrutiny, nor have they produced a promised 'systematics' paper setting out possible sources of error although one was promised. Another problem for the science community is that, although the peer-review process is underway the team have not yet published their findings in a science journal.

Note that no-one is suggesting any dishonesty or falsification of data here, only questioning the validity and reliability of the conclusions from the data and whether it is the conclusive evidence for inflation that it was hailed as initially. As always, the concern is not whether the evidence agrees with the conclusion but whether the conclusion follows from the evidence. This is a crucial difference and one which can't be overstated.

The second article, this time in Science Magazine, is on a different scale altogether and deals with a strong suspicion of dishonesty and data manipulation or falsification. Although not formally proven there is growing concern about the work of Jens Förster, a Dutch researcher in psychology who resigned recently from the University of Amsterdam. As reported by Frank van Kolfschooten in Science Magazine, doubts had been raised about the statistical probability of his results being genuine and not the result of data manipulation to produce the desired results. One enquiry by the University of Amsterdam concluded that they were 'virtually impossible' whilst another concluded that there had been data manipulation in a 2012 paper.

Förster had accepted the charge of data manipulation but claimed the data used was from research in Germany, mostly at Jacobs University Bremen between 1999 and 2008 and suggested an unidentified and over-enthusiastic assistant had changed the data. However, emails have now emerged from 2009 which appear to be discussing the details of the experimental method to be used and which clearly post-date the pre-2008 German research claim. The offer of a professorship at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, supported by a €5 million grant from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, has now been postponed.

So, in both these examples we see the scientific community using the scientific method to ensure that both genuine mistakes and deliberate falsifications are identified and investigated with all sides of the argument being heard before a final conclusion is reached - and the sanctions which inevitably follow from exposed deliberate falsification which can bring a reputation into disgrace and a career to a sudden end.

The reason for this, and the reason why it raises such concern in the scientific community is because the entire point of science is to arrive closer to the ultimate truth and to ensure that any conclusions are only and precisely what the evidence supports, nothing more and nothing less. It does not matter how badly one wishes that there was data to support a favourite hypothesis or how much one wishes to be the first to provide an elusive proof of a hypothesis, and it does not matter how much one researcher might put his own career prospects above his respect for truth, honesty and integrity, or how easily one researcher falls for the temptation to just change the data a little to show the world the 'truth' as he/she sees it, or to flatters his/her boss with the brilliance of his methods. None of this adds to the strength of the conclusion. The only thing that matters is the truth.

Contrast this to what we witness daily in theology and especially fundamentalist theology and apologetics where the only thing that matters is that the argument arrives at the 'right' conclusion; the conclusion that faith tells them is the right one. This allows apologists like William Lane Craig to get away with blatantly false arguments, circular reasoning, repetition of refuted arguments to a different audience and glaring misrepresentation of statistical methods such as Baye's Theorem which, used correctly would have proved the probability of Jesus resurrecting from the dead was virtually zero, as shown here, not the virtual certainty he claimed to the delight of his Christian audience eager for confirmation of their bias.

This is the simple faith fallacy which allows Muslims, Christians, Jews, Shintoists and Hindus to look at the same evidence and arrive at entirely different conclusions, and why that conclusion never changes. It's also why no evidence that might change that conclusion is ever recognised or taken into account. It doesn't support the conclusion therefore the evidence is wrong, and why when asked for the evidence for their god, all supporters of all religions can, with equal confidence and with a sweep of the arm tell you to, "Look around! The evidence is everywhere". The evidence is everywhere because it is simply deemed to be evidence; their faith tells them so. And it's also the reason that what's presented as a serious science text book for Christian schools can come up with this extraordinarily bigoted statement presented as a basic principle of science:

1. 'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."
2. If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.
3. Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

William S. Pinkerton, Biology for Christian Schools

The conclusion is sacred so the facts must be ignored. If science had staggered along with that philosophy we would still be in the Bronze Age arguing about the best shape for wheels and arrowheads, and you couldn't be reading this. Religions, with their sacred conclusions and fixed dogmas, offering nothing more than comforting certainties, the delusion of false 'knowledge' and excuses for hate and ignorance, have no choice but to become increasingly irrelevant as human society progresses without them.

'via Blog this'

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Starting From The Conclusion

Recently, I've been reading A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian. Its purpose is to create 'Street Epistemologists' who can casually engage people in gentle, non-threatening conversations about faith and sow the seeds of Atheism by asking the right questions or making the right point at the right place in a conversation. The weak-point in theistic argument is of course the thing they regard as their strength - their faith in faith as a valid way to determine truth.

But, without evidence, faith is nothing more substantial than pretending to know things you don't know. In effect, the conclusion is whatever the 'faithful' want it to be. As Peter Boghossian goes on the say:

Why Faith Is Dangerous

The recent Twitter spat between two people whom I admire has prompted me to look again at faith and what it can lead to. They are the (normally) left-leaning political journalist with a mercurial mind, rapier wit and impeccable logic, Mehdi Hassan, who is also a Muslim, and the evolutionary biologist, author, Humanist and Atheist, Richard Dawkins.

The spat began when Dawkins, who had previously been told by Hassan in a public debate, that he believed Mohammad had literally flown to Heaven on a flying horse, just as the Qur'an says, and Dawkins, perhaps rather abrasively (which is too easy with only 140 characters) seemed to question how he could hold such illogical views and still be considered an objective journalist.

If Religions Were True They Wouldn't Need Dogma.

Because I said so!

Why do religions require dogmas (or should that be dogmata)? Why can't they do what science does and use evidence?

Dogma is the official system of belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system's paradigm, or the ideology itself. They can refer to acceptable opinions of philosophers or philosophical schools, public decrees, or issued decisions of political authorities.

In religion:
Dogmata are found in religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, where they are considered core principles that must be upheld by all believers of that religion. As a fundamental element of religion, the term "dogma" is assigned to those theological tenets which are considered to be well demonstrated, such that their proposed disputation or revision effectively means that a person no longer accepts the given religion as his or her own, or has entered into a period of personal doubt. Dogma is distinguished from theological opinion regarding those things considered less well-known. Dogmata may be clarified and elaborated but not contradicted in novel teachings (e.g., Galatians 1:6-9). Rejection of dogma may lead to expulsion from a religious group.

Wipedia - Dogma.