What? No Afterlife? Is God A Nihilist?

Browsing my trusty KJV Bible today I came across the following astonishing passages - well, astonishing that is to anyone who believes that the god of the Bible gives their life purpose and reason and promises an eternity in Heaven (or Hell):

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:

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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:

Blimey! So God tells us in his inerrant book that there is no afterlife and it doesn't matter what you do in life, it'll all count for nothing in the end! No purpose and no meaning to life whatsoever. What a forlornly depressing thought, unless you find a purpose for it yourself and so give your own life meaning...

It's a pig. In a poke! On my life! Would I lie to you?

Talk about Nihilism.

Where on earth did all the later stuff about Heaven and Hell and having a grandstand seat to watch everyone who disagrees with you suffering in eternal agony for that heinous crime come from? Surely it can't have been made up to give sanctimoniously self-righteous people something to look forward to, or so preachers could pretend to be selling us something useful, like a pig in a poke, could it?

Mind you, it was a master stroke any snake-oil salesman would have been proud of: it'll only work after you're dead - when it'll be too late to come looking for me, even if you are aware of the con, which you won't be, according to Ecclesiastes 9:5.

Still, at least the Bible has nailed that lie and agrees with Atheists, eh?

So, it looks like the only thing left is to do what Atheists and Humanists advocate - enjoy life, live it to the full and try to leave earth a little better than the way you found it. No ambition could be more noble and worthwhile than that modest ambition.

It's probably easy to work out why this is never taught in Sunday-school or preached about from any pulpit.

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Gospel Of Judas

Codex Tchacos, page 33 - The Gospel of Judas

Page 33 of Codex Tchacos, the first page of the Gospel of Judas.

Nope. This isn't an April Fool joke. There really IS a Gospel attributed to Judas Iscariot.

It was written before 180 CE, when Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons, wrote a document railing against it. The only known existing copy - a Coptic version which seems to have been translated from Greek and which was discovered in 1970 near Ben Masah, Egypt - has been carbon dated to between 220 and 340 CE.

It is an account contained within the so-called Codex Tchacos, in which Judas relates how Jesus taught him the secrets of Gnosticism because he alone was capable of understanding them, hence his separation from the other disciples. Judas also relates how he was carrying out Jesus' instructions when he identified him to the Roman soldiers, so ensuring the planned crucifixion went ahead. This would explain the curious paradox of it being Judas who ensured that the 'divine' plan for Jesus' crucifixion happened, whilst Simon Peter tried to stop it, yet Judas is despised and reviled as the archetypal traitor and Simon Peter is the 'rock' upon which the Catholic Church is built.

One thing which is interesting about this document, the so-called Euangelion Ioudas (Gospel of Judas), is that it is one of the earliest recorded extra-biblical mentions of Jesus, and yet it's never cited as evidence for the historicity of the biblical Jesus, at least not the traditional citations.

Permitting Extremists

The problem with all the exclusive monotheist religions is that they have a ‘holy’ book which can’t be questioned or disputed. They have a book which they believe contains the holy words of their god as revealed through divinely inspired ‘prophets’.

So it must be true; all of it; without question or doubt.

There is no moderate position possible over this. All truth was revealed by an omniscient god in that book and those truths are eternal. It is not for mere mortals to dispute those truths.

To not believe the Bible, Qur'an, Talmud or The Guru Granth Sahib is to leave the 'faith'; to cease to be a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Sikh.

The best a moderate can do when confronted with something so grotesquely and obviously wrong as ordering genocide or child murder; of permitting rape; of relegating women to subservient chattel status; of encouraging racism and slavery and cultural supremacy, is to try to explain it away as situational, out of context, allegorical, justified ONLY in the special circumstances pertaining at that time (which, incidentally, merely begs the question of just why it was included in the book in the first place), etc, etc.

Moderates claim to be able to discern a message different to the one given in the holy book whilst never acknowledging that the message was wrong in the first place and could not have been the work of a loving, merciful, just and benevolent god.

By defending the inerrancy of the god which inspired the book and the inerrancy and perfection of its message; by explaining away any reason to doubt or question the basic tenets of the ‘faith’ believers derive from the book, moderates grant permission to extremists.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

Dr William Lane Craig, Christian Apologist

Extremists read exactly the same words and see this inerrant and perfect god inerrantly telling them to kill those who disagree with them; even to heroically kill themselves to do so, sure in the certain knowledge that they will be rewarded by the inerrant and loving god which told them to do such things.

Extremists read exactly the same words and see this inerrant and perfect god inerrantly telling them that it created the universe and life on it in just seven days, and that all humans have been contaminated by 'sin' and need to spend their lives abjectly apologizing and begging for forgiveness for something they had no control over and which, if it was done at all, was done many thousands of years ago.

And so they have permission to tell their unfortunate children, and anyone else's children, that they are unworthy sinners who need to grovel in abject subservience to this god who will inflict eternal torture and torment on them for even daring to think it might not be all true.

Extremists read exactly the same words and see this inerrant and perfect god inerrantly telling them that what they can see in the physical evidence all around them is wrong and so they have permission to insist their children not be taught science but be taught a primitive mythology instead; that their understanding of the universe should never be permitted to rise above that of Bronze Age marauders whose 'science' was such that they hadn't even invented the wheel and believe the earth was flat, had a dome over it with holes in as stars, and stood at the centre of a very small universe.

Extremists read exactly the same words and see a perfect god telling them to kill their sister or daughter if she 'dishonours' the family. They read these same words and see a perfect god telling them to behead unbelievers. They see a perfect good telling them all other peoples and religions and anyone who disagrees with them are wrong and are working for Satan in the name of evil, to be vigorously opposed by all means available, including persecution, dispossession, torture and genocide.

And they have permission granted them by the moderates to do these things in the name of a religion which the moderates have told them they can't question and for a god the moderates have told them is inerrant and perfect and indeed inspired the prophets to write the book they read. The same moderates who have defended, in the name of freedom of conscience, their right to hold their beliefs and to practice their 'faith' free from the sanctions a decent society normally applies to its anti-social miscreants.

Moderates grant permission to the extremists to use their 'faith' as an excuse for their antisocial behavior and an excuse for their demands to be given control over the lives of others.

The only real difference between a moderate and an extremist is the moderates assume their god couldn’t really have meant those despicable things and so must have meant something else, whilst, of course, still being inerrant and omniscient. Extremist have no such doubts.

Tolerating the intolerant and granting them the right to try to take away our freedoms is playing into their hands. You can be sure they would quickly deny us the same tolerance and freedoms they demand for themselves if they ever form a theocracy. The evidence of history is that no unrestrained theocracy has ever been tolerant of dissenters. All unrestrained theocracies have used their power not to improve the lot of the people but to restrain and control them and reverse centuries of social, cultural and economic progress back to some assumed dream time in the Bronze Age.

The support of theocrats for the idea of freedom of religion is inversely proportional to their strength in society. Once they gain power, support for other people's freedom of religion melts away like a thief in the night.

And moderates grant them permission.

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Christian Logic. No! Really!

Believe it or not, this is a theological argument used by the Christian apologist, Norman Geisler. I have taken it from "Why I became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity" by John W. Loftus.

Supposedly, each step leads inexorably to the next in a 'logical' progression towards a therefore irrefutable conclusion:

1. Truth about reality is knowable.
2. Opposites cannot both be true.
3. The theistic God exists.
4. Miracles are possible.
5. Miracles performed in connection with a truth claim are acts of God to confirm the truth of Gods through a messenger of God.
6. The New Testament documents are reliable.
7. As Witnessed in the New Testament, Jesus claimed to be God.
8. Jesus' claim do divinity was proven by a unique convergence of miracles.
9. Therefore, Jesus was God in human flesh.
10. Whatever Jesus (who is God) affirmed as truth, is true.
11. Jesus affirmed that the Bible is the word of God and whatever is opposed to any biblical truth is false.

Can anyone discern a logical progression leading inexorably and irrefutably to the conclusion here? Apart from maybe the first two points, is there anything which is more than just an assertion or a statement of faith, with no connection with the preceding statement?

Let's see if it works with some other proposition. Let's see if we can use this method to 'prove' that the Pacific Ocean is composed of Scotch Whisky.

1. Truth about Whisky is knowable.
2. Opposites cannot both be true.
3. The Pacific Ocean is compose of Scotch Whisky.
4. Scotch Whisky is possible.
5. Scotch Whisky made in connection with the claim that the Pacific Ocean is made of Scotch Whisky is an act of people who distil Scotch Whisky to confirm the truth of the claim.
6. This blog is reliable.
7. As witnessed in this blog, the Pacific Ocean is composed of Scotch Whisky.
8. The claim that the Pacific Ocean is made of Scotch Whisky has been proven by the miracle of sea water turning into Scotch Whisky in the Pacific Ocean.
9. Therefore the Pacific Ocean is composed of Scotch Whisky.
10. Whatever is affirmed in this blog is true.
11. This blog affirms that the Pacific Ocean is composed of Scotch Whisky and whatever opposes the truth in this blog is false.

YAYHEY! It works!

Pacific Ocean, Made of Scotch Whisky

So, using Christian 'logic', we have 'proved' beyond any possible shadow of doubt that the Pacific Ocean is composed of Scotch Whisky. And, anything which opposes that, including scientific analysis, is false. So that proves it, then!

Given that devastating demonstration of the wondrous power of this theological reasoning, how can anyone now seriously doubt the existence of the Christian god and the truth of the Bible?

Well, that, folks, is the standard of 'logic' which convinces religious people and so gives them the self-confidence to dispense 'truth' to the rest of us and to pontificate on and interfere in all aspects of our lives, the education of our children, our laws and our legal system.

Or is it just the clever-sounding hogwash they use to bamboozle the people they fleece for a living and to gain a power and trust they could never earn on merit?

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Questions For Christians 2

Does your god tell you something is wrong because it is wrong, or is it wrong because your god says so?

Think before you answer.

If you tell me your god tells you it's wrong because it is wrong, you are telling me there is a higher authority than your god; that your god is subject to that higher authority and needs to defer to it for its own knowledge of right and wrong.

If that's so, then surely it's this higher authority which is the real god and yours is merely a subordinate, lesser god.

That's fine, if that's what you want to say. Only now you need to answer the above question with regard to this new, higher god...

On the other hand, you might tell me something is wrong for no other reason than that your god says it is. That's equally fine by me, so long as you realise you're telling me there is no objective morality; no objective right and wrong. That you're telling me, in fact, that there is no objective standard by which you can say whether the god you worship is a good god or an evil one and that when you tell me it's the god of love, you have no way of knowing if that's true or not. That you're telling me you have no objective way to know if it's your god or Satan who's giving the orders and commanding you to act.

So which is it?

A higher god than your god, and no real answer to the question other than a infinity of higher gods all handing down morality to the one beneath it with no end in sight and an answer that's no answer at all?

Or no way for you to tell whether it's a good god or an evil one; a loving god or Satan, who's telling you what to do and a moral code that's as useful as a back pocket in a vest?

Or do you have a third option - that your god has nothing to say about morality and it only has the morality you project onto it?

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Jesus Is Risen - And Pigs Can Fly!

As though the idea of Jesus being born specially to saved us from his father's anger with a blood sacrifice isn't bizarre enough, Christians would have us believe that his death was only for a few days and that he rose again, ascended into Heaven and is still alive to this day. One wonders what the point of dying in the first place was, but enough has probably been said on that already.

Let's now look at the rose again and ascended into Heaven part.

The evidence for this is to be found where? You've guessed it; in the Bible which was written by people who wanted you to believe Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and is still alive. No other evidence exists outside the Bible and no contemporaneous written accounts of it appear anywhere in any records or any non-biblical sources whatsoever.

Children Of An Amoral God.

How many times do you hear a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Sikh claim there can be no morality without a god? How many times do you see Atheists on Twitter and elsewhere being told they have no morals and have no way of telling right from wrong; that you can't trust an Atheist because they don't know why it's wrong to kill, rape, steal and abuse children?

Let's look at this for a moment.

Do these people really believe that, before their holy book was written down and people heard about their god's laws, people simply went around killing, raping, stealing and abusing children and it didn't occur to anyone that it was wrong in any way? Do they really believe that suddenly people heard of these new laws and thought, "Ah! In that case I had better stop this killing, raping, stealing and child abuse, or a god will punish me"? Is it realistic to assume that, before the Bible or the Qur'an were taken outside the Middle East to Europe and Asia, society consisted of people raping, murdering and stealing and that no child was safe?

Richard Dawkins on William Lane Craig

Richard Dawkins' explaining why he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig.

Interesting as much for Dawkins' reasons as the revolting WLC quotes where he attempts to justify genocide and child murder. One can almost hear Adolf Hitler saying "I wish I'd said that!" (Tweet this)

Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig | Richard Dawkins | guardian.co.uk:

'via Blog this'

It speaks volumes of certain branches of modern Christianity that William Lane Craig is highly regarded as a leading exponent of the faith. Other leading Christians have been noticeable by their reticence to come forward and publicly dissociate themselves from William Lane Craig's repugnant views.

They may, of course, avail themselves of the comment section of this blog should they wish to purge themselves of that sin of omission.

Come See A Christian Promoting Genocide

Yesterday we in the Twitter community witnessed the grotesque spectacle of another Christian apologist trying to justify and defend genocide and child murder:

Admittedly he was only taking his inspiration from a leading apologist, William Lane Craig.  Apparently, it's fine, just so long as you remember to blame it on a god.

Anyone wishing to copy this image is more than welcome to do so.

Things a God Can't Possibly Know.

Thinking logically - after all, that's what Atheists do, so you can expect nothing less of me - there are several things no god could know about itself.

1. That it is omniscient.
   • To know this, any god would need to know that it knows everything, but how could it be aware of something it doesn't know about? It could only know what it knows it knows. It could not possibly know about something it doesn't know about.
   • As Donald Rumsfeld once painfully reminded us, there are unknown unknowns.
   • So any claim it might make about omniscience may be false and can not be made with any certainty.

How Do You Know Satan Didn't Write The Bible?

Okay, Christians. Tell me how you know for sure that Satan didn't write the Bible.

Yes, I know. I'm an Atheist so I don't believe in Satan or any other spirits, evil, benign or supremely indifferent - but YOU do.

So, how can you tell that your god either wrote the Bible or inspired its authors and not Satan, the Great Deceiver?

One problem you have is that you claim that morality, and especially our knowledge of right and wrong, was revealed to us by your god in the Bible or by communication through various prophets and saints as recorded in the Bible. So you have no external references by which to judge the morality of the Bible.

So, what if Satan wrote the Bible to mislead you? What if your god has given us science so we can discover the lies Satan wrote in the Bible?

The Kalâm Cosmological Fallacy

The Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) has its origins in medieval Islam of the Kalâm tradition but it has been adopted by Christian apologists, notably William Lane Craig, who appear to believe it proves only the Christian god of the New Testament, ignoring the fact that it was originally formulated to ‘prove’ the Islamic god of the Qur’an.

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.
4. That cause must be God.

In essence, the KCA is arguing that:

1. There can be no natural cause for the universe.
2. Therefore the cause must be supernatural.
3. The only possible supernatural cause must be whichever god the argument is being used to promote.

Clearly, we only need to refute 1 for the entire argument to collapse since this is the premise from which the rest is assumed to flow. We only need to show that a natural cause is possible to refute the KCA. The onus of proof lies with those using the KCA to prove their implicit claim that the cause MUST be supernatural, so the onus is upon them to refute our possible natural cause AND show that there are no other possible natural explanations.

Unless they are able to do so, reliance on the KCA is dishonest and disingenuous.

Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.

The God of Personal Necessity

Words of Delusion

This is probably the second most popular religious fallacy and, like the God of the Gaps fallacy is accepted by very many otherwise intelligent people. Like the God of the Gaps fallacy it too is so ludicrous when spelled out that it's astonishing that it's even attempted, yet it crops up time and again in discussion with believers of all creeds.

It takes several forms but essentially the argument is always, there must be a god otherwise the consequences would be [something undesirable, unpleasant or otherwise unacceptable].

Some examples are:

The Doublethink of the God Delusion

Doublethink or the ability to simultaneously hold two mutually contradictory opinions.

This blog is a response to the challenge from @TweetMinistries on Twitter to comment on a blog by Gary Gutting, a philosophy teacher at the University of Notre Dame. The blog was a critique of, “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.

Gutting's orginal blog may be read at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/on-dawkinss-atheism-a-response/

Gutting starts off badly and shows he hasn't understood what he is criticising by summarising Dawkins as saying natural selection explains the complexity of the universe. Dawkins only ever argues that natural selection accounts for the diversity and complexity of life, not of the universe. However, this is not the central argument of Gutting’s case.

The central argument is that Dawkins failed to take into account the theological argument that God is a special case and can be regarded as irrational, therefore it should be exempt from arguments aimed at showing there is no rational basis for a belief in one.

Gutting correctly points out that Dawkins' argument is that a creator god would necessarily be more complex than the universe it created, therefore the argument for a god from complexity is unsatisfactory in that it simply introduces another unexplained layer of complexity, so not only failing to solve the problem but actually making it worse.

He then complains that Dawkins never addressed the fact that, “philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God”.

This neatly sidesteps the problem of the necessary knowledge and information required to create a universe with all its complexity. The definition of God is shifted dramatically away from an omniscient, omnipotent god capable of emotions such as love and anger, able to formulate morality, hand down laws of behaviour and to monitor and record our thoughts, and in whose image we were created, to something much easier to fit into the debate at hand. This god is now a simple substance, presumably having no complexity whatsoever, yet still has the “power and knowledge attributed to it”.

In other words, this god has complexity without having complexity. Yep! That IS irrational, but that’s not a problem either. You see there is always “the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation...”, something Gutting also complains that Dawkins didn’t take into account.

What Gutting is complaining of here is that Dawkins should have accepted the workarounds for the difficult questions which theologians have assiduously devised to help them ignore them, and that he cheated by not allowing for them.

Yes indeed, Dawkins, in his argument that there was no rational explanation for a god did not take into account that there is an irrational explanation which should have been regarded as rational because it’s not fair to subject it to rational analysis (because it would fail that test).

Gutting then attempts to support this view by reference to Bertrand Russell’s point that we would require very strong evidence to believe that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun. Dawkins agrees with Russell that an extraordinary claim such as that requires an extraordinary level of supporting evidence to justify its acceptance.

He points out that, if astronauts had reported a teapot shaped object in orbit and satellite data had strongly suggested that there was indeed a teapot in orbit, this would be sufficient evidence to at least cause us to allow for the possibility of the teapot hypothesis being correct.

Gutting then tries to argue that there is indeed just such strong evidence to support the god hypothesis. Unfortunately the only evidence he has to offer is, “There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being”, neglecting to point out that none have ever produced evidence of a reality, and, “there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence”, as though arguments from authority are a good as real evidence.

What Gutting is attempting to do here is to suggest that somehow, the subjective interpretations of perception and the opinions of philosophers should be place on an equal footing with scientific data and independent eye-witness accounts. This is, of course, nothing more than special pleading again. The god hypothesis will only work if you exempt it from the normal tests you apply to other hypotheses, therefore it should be granted these exemption without further justification.

Gutting reinforces this claim with, “But religious believers will plausibly reply that science is suited to discover only what is material (indeed, the best definition of “material” may be just “the sort of thing that science can discover”). They will also cite our experiences of our own conscious life (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.) as excellent evidence for the existence of immaterial realities that cannot be fully understood by science”.

He has ignored the fact that neurophysiology is material and so consciousness, thoughts, feelings, etc, are not evidence of the immaterial at all (‘plausible’ seems to mean ‘convenient’ in this context). And there again is that plea of special status for the god hypothesis. Now the reason is that this god should be exempt from ALL tests of existence because it is now assumed to be immaterial and so beyond the reach of science.

In summary then, Gutting is arguing that Dawkins was wrong to argue that there is no rational basis for belief in a god because belief in god is irrational and Dawkins should have accepted that as er... rational.

Presumably this form of 'logic' is perfectly acceptable in theological circles.

We also have here yet another example of the special pleading which theologians use to defend their god hypothesis. Their little hypothesis wants to play with the big boys of science and compete on an equal footing, but it needs affirmative action and special assistance to get by. It’s not fair that it should have to take the same tests scientific hypotheses have to pass. It’s perfectly fair to claim it is as rational as scientific hypotheses even though it is irrational.

This compartmentalised doublethink is a perfect example of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

It's really rather sad that humans, in attempting to create a god, have only managed to create a seriously handicapped one.

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