AgeOfReasonFeedback

1. I am an engineer and I know from first hand experience that designers/builders/creators want their creation to function as designed.

2. Human beings are “designed” with the ability to think logically and reason deductively.

3. It is illogical and unreasonable to “just believe” in things for which there is no credible evidence.

4. This illogicality represents an aberration, a flaw in your function—you are not performing as you were designed to.

    First, when you speak of the environment today, I believe God has already explained why it has fallen. The reason is because of sin, that was our choice not His. Now I'm sure you won't want to waste time on theology so I will just make a brief statement. What has atheism truly given this world? Who has ever been inspired by atheism? What hope does atheism give to this world other than live now because it's all we got? Now let's ask the same question of Christianity, and I mean the "TRUE" Christianity that Jesus left for us. Look at the art, poetry (which you have a fondness for), missions, hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, charities even science that has been inspired by one person, Jesus Christ. I don't believe I have ever seen a St "who's kidding who" Hospital, or Our Lady of Intellectual Thought Missions. Now you name me one person who has inspired 1% of the people who Jesus has? How many millions have turned their lives around from hateful thinking to addictions to whatever else ails us, by turning to the true Christ? The hope, the beauty, the great anticipation of a loving God just waiting for us to choose Him with His arms wide open saying," I love you, now enter into your eternal paradise I have prepared for you". This is more real to me than thinking we are one big accident hurling through space heading nowhere with a gorilla as an ancestor. So I guess what I am saying is, thank God I am so foolish as to believe in Jesus. I know he will be waiting for me when I finally leave this world and I will be happy that I chose to love Him rather than laugh Him off as a foolish fantasy. Remember, love has to be a choice, it can't be manipulated or coerced, otherwise it is not love!
    Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for strengthening my relationship with my savior Jesus Christ!! May you find His love again someday.

E.D.: I think the word for all this is "sad." It is sad to live one's life so out of touch with reality. It is sad to be so fixated on sin, forced to believe that we ourselves are responsible for all the evil we encounter in our world. I call it "the guilt defense." It is not a defense of ourselves, but of God. The problem with belief in an omnipotent, all-loving God, is that one must defend him against all the evil in the world. How to do that? By declaring ourselves guilty! To justify the failings of God, we transfer the failings onto ourselves in order to absolve him. We have forced this omnipotent, all-loving God to punish us. In some twisted reverse irony, we crucify ourselves to forgive God's sins against us.
    Such a doctrine is fatal to human pride, to optimism, to intellectual and emotional maturity. If the evil of the world, God's punishment, is so great and overwhelming, it can only mean that our own sin and degradation is equally great and overwhelming. It must mean that the world is a total write-off, along with our human selves, and so our focus must be on a future world and a transformed state. At the same time, as the ultimate punishment for sin, God has prepared a horrific place of damnation beside which the evils of this world are a summer picnic, a few troublesome ants and a bit of rain. Our energies must be devoted to avoiding this eternal torment and finding the 'eye of the needle' to squeeze into Heaven. To make matters worse, we are told that we have been offered this privileged place in God's company only through the murder—by us—of his Son, the sacrificed Lamb gutted on our behalf, the only means available to persuade God to unlock his mercy vault. (This doctrine is founded in the ancient and prehistoric practice of human and animal blood sacrifice; this is something which more modern times have long since repudiated as primitive and odious, yet it is perpetuated at the heart of Christian faith.)
    Human pride? How about human sanity? How do we achieve simple mental health in the face of debilitating dogma like this? How do we achieve cohesiveness in human society when one set of preposterous beliefs is in mutually exclusive competition—sometimes bloody—with other preposterous beliefs? How do we raise our children to be functional in the world when we fill their heads with the nonsense that governs Robert's view of reality? I talked in one of my Age of Reason Comments about the mother in evangelical Middle America whose outlook on the world is so warped and soured she declares herself willing to see her 9-year-old daughter's life cut short by Jesus' Second Coming, which she hopes and expects is imminent. She has taught her daughter that the one thing she can be certain of in life is that Jesus died for her. (Seeing the daughter declare this on camera was particularly sad.) What messages about the world and human nature has that vulnerable young mind been infected with? How can she prepare for a productive and mature adulthood?
    In Robert's eyes, none of this matters. After all, didn't Jesus ignore and dismiss it all as inconsequential beside the only thing that does matter, a future in another world which only he can guarantee? Another world whose arrival was imminent (2000 years ago!) while the present one was on the verge of being destroyed? Since Jesus gave us nothing to better our lot here on earth, nothing to improve our health, our self-knowledge, our understanding of the universe, these things are rendered unimportant—even inimical—to faith, since faith flourishes best in conditions of ignorance and a troubled spirit.
    Robert speaks of Jesus inspiring so many. If Jesus preached a message of love (if he existed at all), it was not original to him and it was in any case an ambivalent one, since he preached intolerance in equal measure. (To reject the objectionable words placed in the mouth of the Gospel Jesus as inauthentic is simply to beg the question, since there is no secure method by which to judge such things.) In the Gospel of John, the dictum to "love one another" is not even universal, but restricted to members of the sect, the elect. (If you don't believe it, consider the plain meaning of John 13:35 in its context.) I don't need to detail the catalogue of horrors inspired by Jesus' name throughout 2000 years, against Jews, against infidels, against heretics, against the pagans and their ancient religions, against the New World populations, against Protestants, against Catholics, against blacks and various 'inferior' humans, against gays and lesbians, against atheists and other dissenters. Jesus inspired two millennia of belief in devils and witches. His parable with the line "compel them to come in" was the scriptural backbone of the Inquisition. Not a single advance in technology, in understanding and controlling the world around us, in medicine, in alleviating human misery or improving mental health, was prompted by the teachings of Jesus, and much was impeded. Jerome said that it was not necessary for a Christian ever to wash again once he had been washed in the blood of the Lamb. The churchmen of Galileo's day refused to look through the astronomer's telescope since, they declared, they already knew from scripture that the sun went around the earth. From lightning rods to stem cell research, religious belief has stood in the way of scientific advancement, of human rights, of education. Almost half the population of the United States lives in a lunatic state, expecting the Rapture within their own lifetimes, when they will be lifted out of this world and carried bodily into Heaven.
    Robert says he'd rather believe in Genesis than Darwin or that he is descended from a gorilla. He makes the mistake of thinking that what he would prefer to be true is in fact what is true. But the world doesn't work that way. We should judge what reality is by the evidence, not by wishful thinking. What makes more sense? Robert's primitive, antiquated, jerry-built assemblage of irrational belief, for which there is not a shred of objective evidence, or the picture of a world that has passed through geological ages to support the evolution of life through natural processes, a picture supported by a mountain of evidence which forms the bedrock of modern science and its understanding of the world's workings? What makes more sense, the evolution of languages through long ages of human development and migration, or God striking down the presumptuous builders of a mud-brick tower and inflicting on them a 'babble' of different tongues? What makes more sense, that humanity, evolving without divine creation or direction, has flaws and failings, is capable of evil while slowly striving to improve itself, or that all evil proceeds from some first-parent sin of eating an apple in contravention of God's directive, an eternal Original Sin staining every descendant and requiring the blood sacrifice of a divine being to override? (To simply label the now-objectionable elements of the Bible as allegorical undermines its entire authenticity—and, of course, biblical inerrantists realize this and have taken refuge in uncritical acceptance that every word must be literally true. Perhaps even the life and figure of Jesus was meant to be allegorical.)
    Robert asks about inspiration. What could be more inspiring than the work of scientists and researchers like Charles Darwin, who unlocked for us, after millennia of ignorance, the key to understanding our actual nature and heritage? What of the orator Robert Ingersoll who in the face of a 19th century establishment that could still throw freethinkers in jail for blasphemy, spoke out in public meetings about the irrationalities and repressive practices of religion? What of the late Carl Sagan, who helped open our minds to the wonders of the universe and to a fearless realization that we need see nothing supernatural behind it? Socrates, Democritus, Copernicus and Galileo, Sigmund Freud, the U.S. Founding Fathers, David Hume and Albert Einstein, countless others who owed no allegiance to church or dogma, all brought mankind to greater enlightenment and freedom and have been an inspiration to many. Medical researchers over the last two centuries have brought us better health and longer life, a conquest of many diseases (supposedly created by God), a slashing of infant mortality rates; we are on the verge of controlling our internal environment, perhaps even to do evolution one better and a lot sooner—none of it due to a Jesus who cast out demons and believed that the end of the world was at hand, and none of it requiring any belief in supernatural dimensions and divine overseers.
    These are Robert's "mere men" with their "trivial" work who have done more than he is willing to acknowledge to better his own life and the lives of millions, more than all the fantasies of personal saviors and prophets and apocalyptic judges whose pragmatic usefulness to society would not fill a thimble. Robert also makes the mistake of thinking that advances which took place within Christian societies took place because of Christianity, whereas advances take place in most societies, including ones holding to beliefs, or lack of them, which Robert hardly accepts as "true." It might be better to say that advances took place in western society in spite of religion, and in fact, the great leap forward in the Renaissance was made possible by the rediscovery and dissemination of ancient Greek learning, whose culture and documents had been lost or destroyed at the beginning of the Dark Ages by Christian forces (kept alive only in the Muslim world).
    The type of inspiration proceeding from Jesus which Robert speaks of is, I suggest, of dubious benefit. While the tendency to do charitable work may be Christianity's one saving grace, there is much to be less thankful for. In order to feel rescued from sin, one must be convinced of sin and guilt in the first place, and Christianity has traditionally been very good at supplying these in unhealthy abundance. Indeed, without them, religion would not survive. To "find" God, one must be converted to a world of fantasy and uncritical thinking, along with a lot of things which are not at all "beautiful," and thus I cannot share in Robert's enthusiasm for achieving this state of mind. I am also skeptical of exaggerated testimonials by so many who portray themselves as having been aimless reprobates and moral wretches in their previous lives before being "born again." Much of that 'conversion' relates to beliefs as well, but this celebrated transformation out of agnosticism or atheism is often into slavish surrender to irrational doctrine. Paul wasn't the only one to declare his beliefs "foolish," an attribute too many believers seem to revel in. They rejoice, too, in their reversion to medievalism, to superstition (ever notice how large Satan looms in the outlook of the newly converted?), prejudice against unbelievers, and an ever greater fixation on sin, evil and correct faith. This type of inspiration the world can do without.
    Finally, Robert speaks of God's "love" in preparing an eternal paradise for those who believe. Why did he not create us for that paradise directly? Why bother with this world at all? Simply to put us to a test? A test which many (if not most, according to traditional views) are fated to fail and suffer an unspeakable punishment; a test for which God created us with a capacity to fail, thus sharing in responsibility for that failure; a test loaded against us in that its requirements for belief contravene the evidence found in the world of science and reason, or in the flawed 'record' of God's dealings with humanity and the sending of his redeemer Son. Much is made of the issue of 'free will.' But a test of moral behavior may be one thing; a Deity might reasonably require such a thing, for which free will would presumably be needed (although whether in fact we do possess this in any usable measure is perhaps debatable). Quite another is a test of belief in his very existence or legitimacy, when so much argues against it, when so much leads us to believe he doesn't exist, or operate in a rational manner. Is all this fair play? Is this unconditional love? What parents conceive a child with the intention of requiring a "test" of that child before they will bestow their love upon it, before they will give their child the best they can offer for a good and happy life in the world into which they have brought it? What parents will choose to create a child and then refuse to have any direct contact with it, but only through unreliable (and competing) intermediaries, uncertain messages or dubious emotional experiences, expecting out of all this to elicit totally committed faith, love and obedience, upon which hinges the child's entire fate of happiness or pain? If we as imperfect, sinful humans would never think of perpetrating such a travesty upon our own children, why would be wish to impute it to an omnipotent, all-loving God?
    Robert speaks of love (toward God) being a choice, but we know from modern psychology that love in children is a response, not a "choice." If they are given love, children will return love, children will be capable of love in their lives. There is little in this world which can be identified as God's "love," despite religious claims. Indeed, much of Robert's energy, and religion's in general, is devoted to explaining why there is such misery in the world, and how it is our own fault, and yet how God expects us to recognize and love him unconditionally, with so much hinging on that response. If children develop self-esteem, they are much more capable of love and positive action toward others, yet religion seems bent on destroying any self-esteem and pride we might be capable of, undermining any sense of achievement and enlightenment arrived at by our own devices. Children are disoriented by contradictions in parental messages, by insecurities and conflicts around them, yet God's created world is full of such things, conflict between reason and revelation, between science's wisdom and God's "folly," between human impulses and divine fiat; yet in Robert's view, all the responsibility lies with us, including the responsibility to cut through all the crap and devote ourselves to the love and worship of this maddening, inscrutible, neurotic—and probably non-existent—Being.
    To subscribe to such a bizarre view of "the truth" would be more than the reasonable mind could bear. And yet, in the face of such arguments Robert thanks me for strengthening his commitment to Jesus Christ. That, too, is a mark of the religiously uncritical mind: when faith is threatened by reason, one must weld that mind more firmly shut, surrender it to irrationality with even greater determination and devotion. Paul and the early Christian Fathers and apologists praised such an approach. Today, we ought to find it crazy, illogical and destructive.
    And it's too great a price to pay for the childish fantasy of living forever with Daddy in a perfect world in the sky. It means we never grow up in this one.

Keith writes:
I don't get to your website as often as I should, the information on your site just keeps building. I read the email from Robert. It's just sad that someone like that has accepted a metaphysical doctrine with so little study, research, and thought. Here is something that is coloring every aspect of Robert's life and yet he seems to have spent all of 5 minutes in any kind of deliberative process.
If Robert were representative of the next generation of Americans, who would we have to design and build the ship that will take humans to Mars? Who is going to find cures for the tropical diseases moving north because of global warming? Who is going to educate our children? Robert and people like him can't do it, their minds have closed down to such a narrow view of existence, they're unable to think or be creative.
If I were a praying person, I'd pray that Robert was an aberration, but sadly he is not. When I get up tomorrow, I'll have to look in the mirror and appreciate the "zombie" staring back at me. :)

    [Millie has written to me before, as one can see below. This time, both her emotions and her fingers ran away with her, but I decided to reprint much of her outburst here, as there is something to be said for an unrestrained reaction to the often blind lunacy we see around us. I won't make any further comment on it, except to say that the same sort of reaction would apply in great measure to the issue of overpopulation.]
    You know, regarding the issue of abortion, I have two sisters who are against it. One of them can be reasoned with and says she is against it but doesn't want to see us fall back into the "coat hanger" self abortions or the shoddy phony "doctors" who will sell you one in a back alley as I used to read stories about when I was a kid. My other sister is a staunch Catholic and no more need be said to her on that issue, she proclaims, but I did while spending two days together after the funeral of my brother, and what I said seemed to make them think (even if only just a little) and though it may or may not be of help to others when faced with relatives who are anti abortion, what I asked of them was this: I asked, first of all, who on earth did they know who doesn't dislike abortion; no one thinks that abortions are the ideal or that they are preferable to letting healthy loved children be born who will lead happy, productive, and fulfilling lives.
    Did they think that abortion is something anyone thinks is "nice"? I asked them to think about this: "Since you always seem so worried about the state of America and its rampant street gangs, crimes, poverty, joblessness, robbery, rapes, murders, etc., what do you think the future is going to be like for your grandchildren and great grandchildren after abortion is abolished and all these unwanted babies are left to fend for themselves because no one wanted them in the first place? Some will be born to the proverbial crack addicts and prostitutes, and will end up living in ghettos, and others may just be born to mothers who may not be financially, intellectually, or emotionally EQUIPPED to bring a child into the world and to actually care for it and raise it well, lovingly, healthfully and intelligently for the next eighteen years (when obviously most of their parents did'nt even have the foresight to use birth control so they wouldn't end up having to have abortions or unwanted children in the first place)? And the government (who is even now about the business of cutting all medical assistance and food stamps, etc., off from the poor, and sending all our jobs out of the country) is'nt going to get any better in the future, I'll wager, so what do you think life is going to be like then? No jobs except for MacDonald's and Walmart's with their "starvation paychecks", and too many people to even begin to fill those? The state of education is going even farther downhill than usual now, (Americans are among the most poorly educated people in the world....sorry, folks, that's the statistics), so what's it going to be like in twenty or thirty years when we have even more children to feed, love, raise, employ, educate, or imprison? What kind of people are we going to be raising? Thousands, maybe millions, more neurotic or insane, unloved, unwanted, neglected, and abused people to fill up even more prisons and more execution chambers (so we can annihilate them after they've gone berserk and killed someone....or maybe who've just been "framed" and are unable to afford anyone but an often useless and incompetent public defender to go to battle for them or just take a snooze in the courtroom) for them? (To any "good" public defenders out there, forgive me....but I know of too many cases of others who weren't good). What kind of a future do you think America has if you hate what's going on now, I asked?
    I personally know a woman who doesn't believe in abortions but whose children, age 3 and 5, (and since then she's had 4 more) were found outside at 3 am one morning after they'd awakened to find themselves once more all alone and frightened and this time unable to go back to sleep because they heard "scary noises", out walking the darkened city streets trying to get to where they thought their "grandma's" house was, (grandma who is herself an alcoholic and was more than likely in her daily drunken stupor), while clutching their little plastic baseball bats (so no one could hurt them) and who ended up lost, crying, and eventually unable to even remember how to return home. They could'nt go forward and they could'nt go backward and so they just broke down and began wailing til someone woke up and called the police (who weren't very kind to them). The five year old is now fourteen and told me this story after she'd been raped and her family did'nt believe her, and her 16 year old brother backed her up, not that I was disbelieving as I'm quite sure this happens to lots of children! My own parents were alcoholics who should have NEVER had children and I remember some very frightening nights waking up alone and going outside crying and looking for someone to help me or just keep me company as I was the second to the youngest in the family and my sisters were grown and gone, (and my brother just a baby himself and left in my care since I was nine, as usual.
    My parents fought DAILY, and we were raised with such screaming and yelling and name calling fights that we were all nervous wrecks all the time. My mother sent my sisters away to live for 4 years with their aunt in Tennessee while my father fought in WW2 and they felt our mother could'nt have loved them at all to send them away at such young ages. They (I had three older sisters...one is dead) all had had babies and were out on their own by the time they were fifteen or sixteen. That was how they escaped! And they have their own horror stories to tell, stories of being neglected, terrified, and of feeling worthless, unloved, and unlovable and these feelings can last all your life, believe me, I know. And being always pointed out as "that drunk couple's kids" doesn't lead to feelings of self worthiness or find you with a lot of friends or playmates in your life. Only the other "losers" kids wanted to play with us. You spend your whole life trying to find the love you missed out on; trying to find self confidence enough to get and keep jobs, and you often end up marrying the wrong kind of people who are often abusive and who have also been neglected, unwanted and unloved themselves....
    I just want people to ask themselves where their "outrage" is on behalf of the neglected, unloved, hungry, warped, frightened children out there now and who will be coming along later. I asked my sisters to think about our own childhood(s) and what's REALLY a cruel thing to do to children? What sort of lives are these little unwanted beings going to end up living? Little future Christians who "love" their neighbors..... to death?? Who let their fear and their refusal to even find out what is true about their own government and their own religious "values"and who allow and even encourage their leaders to sell out their rights with so called Patriot acts? People who never even learn to question whether patriotism is a good thing or a bad thing in the long run? Or how much good religion has really done for the world. Or what hypocrisy is?
    I apologize for going on so long but I am so completely distraught at the thought of what is happening in my country, and in the world, that I sometimes wonder how I've managed to go on for 65 years. The cruelty, the torture stories, the abject poverty that is already rampant around the world, and the suffering of children are just chilling to me but I must tell you another thing that I asked my sisters and that other folks out there might want to ask theirs: "If you think there are no decent jobs out there that pay enough for someone with children to survive on now, what do you think it's going to be like when these children grow up? More hungry, neglected children out wandering the streets scared and alone at night, while mom (and often nonexistent dads) are out getting high, selling their bodies, committing crimes (or maybe it's just maybe middleclass mom's, curled into a ball of hopelessness and depression in a corner somewhere while oblivious to the fact that her kids aren't even in the house at 3 am.....if there is a house to be in). Is this preferable to being aborted in the womb?" Why don't people THINK?

Tom writes:
Your work has helped open expression that was long dormant within my psyche....

There are two, now three authors who have had a seminal influence on my under-educated mind (I have no college worth mentioning).

The first is Desmond Morris, a zoologist who nearly 40 years ago penned two accessible books, The Naked Ape, and The Human Zoo. Mr. Morris did tend to engage in speculative conclusions, but there are two key concepts that I drew from his work that were epiphanies to me.

First, evolution progresses glacially, and this progression is inclusive of all aspects of an animal: its appearance, its survivability, its psyche - more specifically and importantly, its social behavior. We tend to miss that, in terms of evolution, much of the modernization of human endeavors has taken place in the blink of an eye, so to speak. There is most definitely an exponential curve in our technology.

A correlation lies in nature, in that species can find themselves in social settings which they are not yet adequately “wired” to deal with. Mr. Morris sites numerous examples of animals behaving oddly when they find themselves in an unusual social setting. This certainly applies to humans. Mr. Morris deduces from the anthropological record that early humans first behaved much like monkeys, then later much like wolves. Today we live in extremely crowded conditions, with an outlook that must include all other humans, both similar and different. In my own take, we are like wolves living in an bee hive. Without extreme adaptability, we’re most likely to tear hell out of our very existence. Indeed, Mr. Morris describes his amazement and respectful awe that we manage to survive this cathartic social setting we find ourselves in, before our “circuitry” has had time to (hopefully) mutate appropriately.

The important point here, I believe, is that there is nothing “unnatural” about this state of human affairs. We must at least entertain that this can take place wholly within the context of evolution, a process which most definitely countenances, indeed, embraces change and conflict. Yet, probably because early “thinking” man did not yet have much of the evidence we can now take for granted, for most of our recorded history, we sought an “outside” explanation as to why humans tend to behave so badly, and by natural extension, so nobly. It’s the social setting! juxtaposed against our present wiring!... (continued below)

E.D.: I like this observation, in that it provides yet another insight into why religion and its narrow (and always out-dated) viewpoint holds back progress in human self-understanding. When one rejects the evolutionary picture, when one relies for guidance about human nature and ethics on a set of ancient, primitive writings, one closes the door on anything but the most simplistic understanding of what we are, why we are that way, and what we can do to improve it. Religionists hold the deepest abhorrence—and fear—of so-called "moral relativism," but a far greater danger lies in trying to impose a presumed and simplistic "objective" morality (based on the bible, of course) which bears no relation to our true reality in a universe which the bible writers could have had no conception of.

....The second author who made a profound influence on my thinking was Karen Armstrong, who, amazingly, wrote her earliest prolific drafts in longhand! I have only read one book, The Battle for God, an exegesis on fundamentalism in monotheistic religions....

A central theme of her book is what she continually characterizes as “mythos” and “logos”, the old religion vs. science scenario. She contends that both types of thinking appear to be necessary for human fulfillment. I tend to agree, though I may not agree with whatever mythos path she heads down.... (continued below)

E.D.: For students of ancient religion and philosophy, it is unfortunate that she chooses the word "logos" to refer to the science half of the dichotomy, since "logos" had everything to do with the "mythos" half, especially in regard to incipient Christianity. And I would have to dispute her contention that both types of thinking are necessary for human fulfillment. "Myth" has been needed precisely because we were not in a position to understand the universe on its own terms, through the language of natural law and direct examination of its workings on a material, rational level. Once that process of understanding is completed—and we are well on our way to achieving that—the use of myth can be discarded. Its continuing retention is already proving to be counter-productive.

....As you likely have guessed by now, Mr. Doherty, you are the third author to affect me deeply. I started voraciously with the meat on your website, the main and supplementary articles, and have moved on to the potatoes, that is, the rest of your site....You whisk the reader back to the beginnings of Christianity, pull back the veil, and simply ask, as if to say, “What is it that you see?"

Because of the way I grew up, within a fundamentalist setting, it somehow has come as a tremendous relief to me that there appears to be no such thing as a solid and authoritative historical Jesus. At first, I repudiated all that was religious, at about the time I reached adulthood. In returning to my roots, I slowly worked backwards, discarding one after another the preconceptions of this preposterous “logical faith”. First to go were the unique heterodoxical beliefs of my particular childhood religion. Next, the inerrancy of the Bible and the authority of canonical selection were jettisoned; by extension, so too the factual overall historicity of the Bible, as well as its supposed moral high ground. But that last nut, that is Jesus, proved to be a tough one to crack, at least head on. Your site has done this for me, for which I thank you.

I would like to claim that I subliminally caught that which you so handily point out in your work, only waiting for someone like you to trip the trigger, but it is much more accurate to say that I am left thinking, “Of course! Why didn’t I see that before?” It is relatively easy to move in and out of the various vagaries of doctrinal dispute, the dogmatic doggerel produced by theological wrestling, but it is quite another to assail the one fundamental of 99.9% of Christianity, that of an historical Jesus.

I could discern an evolution (or devolution, perhaps) from the Hebrew faith to Catholicism, from Catholicism to Protestantism, from Protestantism to my own Seventh-Day Adventism, and Lord only knows what next. The missing link, as it were, was that the Hebrew faith went to an early form of Christianity, before moving on to Catholicism. Nor were any of these transitions as happily full of clarity as we tend to pride ourselves in thinking. Further, I used to allegorize this concept as an onion, with layers being stripped away one at a time. There were two fundamental problems here, first, an onion implies a core center of truth, and second, there was many a branching, some which withered, some which went their own way. A tree provides a better allegory.

By at least entertaining the notion of a mythical Jesus, the transition between articulations of faith somehow seems to flow more smoothly in my mind. To express it another way, there is no longer such a watershed moment in worldly history. Why, even our timeline demarcation may be entirely base on a wholly contrived personification.
Again, I thank you for the deep and scholarly work that you have done to date, and I truly appreciate the open nature of your website with all of its attendant and numerous postings. You are clearly part of a courageous movement that I believe is fundamentally important to religion today.

Dave writes:

I simply cannot stop reading your Age of Reason website! As a former researcher at a major U.S. university, and now medical student, I am appalled, terrified, and fascinated by the information exposed in your articles and the books you bring to my attention.

A quick question, if I may: Which country can one go to that does NOT embrace fundamentalist religion? Perhaps none, so the question might then be: Over which country does religion hold the least sway in terms of setting policy, etc.? I have heard that European countries, in general, are not following the example being set in the U.S., and in fact, are begining to feel the U.S. to be a country of religious fanatics (to which I would agree).
Thanks for your time, and keep up your much-needed work!

E.D.: Leaving aside Communist China, it is probably true that only Europe in general, along with Japan and Canada, are fortunate enough not to have their societies and to a great extent their governments, under the sway of fundamentalist religion. Canada and Australia are feeling pressures in that direction, but their governments remain secular. (As is ex-communist Russia.) The United States, of course, is supposed to be a secular nation, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, but try telling that to George Bush, Karl Rove, and a growing proportion of both the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. Central and South America, while perhaps not governed by fundamentalist-oriented administrations, are nevertheless thoroughly Catholic and largely toe the Vatican line. Much of the rest of the world is Islamic, in which there is very little distance between liberal and fundamentalist; the former term is something of a misnomer. I suppose somewhere in between is Hindu India, which has a strong, if minority, rationalist element. (This survey is simply my own personal observation and opinion.)

Kirk writes:
I've come to your website through a series of clicks and turns originating at Amazon.com. I cannot seem to come down from the fence. Though I am inclined towards religious skepticism, and I have really valued reading Dan Barker's book Losing Faith in Faith, it seems that whenever I am not reading excellent works like his, and I am just out and about in the world, then my mind allows that perhaps all that religious/christian stuff is perhaps true after all. When I see the huge mega-churches thriving and filled with energetic people, when I still brood about what happens when we die, I then climb back up on my fence, holding your book in one hand, and looking across the street at the thriving mega-church, thousands of cars pulling into the parking lot...what's going on here? I ventured into the mega-church and the "happening" energy of the place was wonderful to behold. But then the freaky vacant stares of the zombie-like humans, and the right-wing absolutism of the preacher's homily drove me to the nearest exit. In my heart—is this the final place to consider things?—I feel that the modern world is going increasingly insane, and these mega-churches just lubricate the insanity. All this "education" and "evolution" has led people to these places, where they are happy not to think, to accept simple and simplistic world views that will lead to their "salvation".

    Sigh...it's lonely out here on the fence. But I cannot enter that place again. I love your writings. Do you have any advice about getting down off the fence for good?

E.D.: The "herd" instinct is very strong in human nature, and naturally so, since it's an essential component to societal cooperation. Herd views and behaviors are inevitable; we couldn't do without them. There always have been and always will be current collective beliefs, philosophies, practices, artistic and recreational activities, and so on, since cultures and civilizations are formed on them and progress proceeds through such mediums, even if they include elements which are anything but 'progressive' or eventually lose their usefulness. Like evolution, such progress takes place when something out of the ordinary, outside the herd's common makeup, happens: a mutation in thought, insight or discovery. Soon it spreads into the herd (or becomes a new, dominant herd), and the process continues. (A common view of how evolution itself proceeds is very much like this, known as "punctuated equilibrium.")
    My point is that, by recognizing this process, and accepting that there will always be dominant and at least temporarily successful expressions of societal belief and behavior, whether in the religious, social or political arena, one is less likely to be deceived into thinking that any current expression enjoys some kind of eternal truth or validity. Some may certainly be more useful, progressive and intellectually supportable than others, but ultimately nothing is permanent. The ancient world out of which Christianity grew had a culture of philosophy, cosmology and religious beliefs which lasted for centuries but are virtually dead today (except as they have evolved into later forms such as Christianity), yet were regarded by contemporaries as expressions of eternal truth. The mega-churches of today are no different than the faith cultures of ancient Egypt or Olympian Greece and Rome, believed in by millions over millennia. No one today remains on the fence regarding Amon-Re or Zeus, Osiris or Mithras, and the Platonic views of a dualistic, earth-centered universe which enthralled and enslaved philosophers and believers of the period lie fossilized in the cemetery of dead delusions.
    While it may be hard to envision our own Jesus as going down the same road to extinction, it will happen. To some extent it has already happened in parts of the civilized world, such as Europe, where mega-churches are not to be found—only hollow cathedrals that few of the younger generation are entering. Kirk need only adopt a wider perspective. If he stands up on his fence and takes a look around, across geographical, historical and scientific vistas, I am sure he'll soon jump off—toward the other side. He's already recognized the things that drove him out from his previous seat, the "zombie-like humans" and the "right-wing absolutism" of those who did their best to cripple his intellect and bury his spirit under a load of guilt, bigotry and superstition. I suggest he spend more time looking into the face of modern science and humanism. He might even find ways of losing his fear over death.

And by the way, there's often no better antidote to the Bible than...reading the Bible. Here's what another reader had to say on the subject:

Ralph writes:
I have had an exchange with believers in my local newspaper regarding the recent hurricanes in the American south and what effect they have on the concept of a loving God. I suggested that we take a closer look at him:
    God said, "I create evil" (Isaiah 45:7 KJV). But sometimes he changed his mind about the evil that he planned to do (Exodus 32:14). He promised to punish children for the iniquity of their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents (Exodus 20:5; Numbers 14:18). Instead of punishing king David for adultery and murder, the LORD killed his little baby boy instead (2 Samuel 12:15b-18a). Because some men had looked into the Ark of the Covenant, the LORD killed more than fifty thousand of his people (1 Samuel 6:19). God not only condoned slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46; etc.); he also sold slaves himself (Joel 3:8).
    The LORD God of the Bible loved not only the sacrifice of animals and birds but also of humans. "The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep" (Exodus 22:29b-30a). Later in the Bible he told us why (Ezekiel 20:25-26). The God of the Bible also promoted cannibalism. "You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters" (Leviticus 26:29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57; Ezekiel 5:10).
    No amount of wishful thinking can turn the God of the Bible into a lovable character.

E.D.: Ralph's catalogue of reprehensible behavior on the part of the God of the Bible is, of course, only a small portion of the litany of such things found in the Old Testament, and even the Jesus of the New Testament is not without his own anti-social dimensions, admonishing his followers to take up the sword and to reject family and friends to join him, or his megalomania in declaring himself the only avenue to salvation. His superstitions in regard to Satan and demon spirits possessing the sick, his urging that the believer "compel" non-believers to come into the fold, were directly responsible for much of the misery of the Middle Ages in Inquisition, witch-burnings, and abysmal ignorance in the area of medical knowledge. One of the reasons why fundamentalist religion is so right-wing, so bigoted and intellectually stunted, so lacking in compassion and flexibility, is because the world of the Bible (not to mention the Church itself) is so exemplary in these respects.

E.D.: What if we and universe were created by a God who was mad? One who in his insanity continues to laugh away at our desperate struggles to cope with his pain-filled creation? Isn't this as equally a feasible postulation as deism to explain the nature of our world? You suggest a deity who regards death as a "good" thing, the gateway to a better plane of existence. Why set up such a system in the first place? Why create the world and humans just to observe them like rats in a labyrinth? Isn't there a certain madness—or at least inhumaneness—to this? (In fact, considering the lack of God's help in the miseries of the world, it's not very different from the normal Christian view.)
As "a man of reason," I don't try to postulate scenarios that are totally beyond verification, much less govern my life and outlook by such things. And I definitely don't do it in the face of a reality I see around me which creates rational and moral problems in such scenarios. The impersonal and evolving universe which has no innate directing or 'moral' creator or authority (before beings with such capacities—as in ourselves—arrive on the scene) presents the best explanation with the fewest problems, as stark and unappealing a concept as this might be to some people. There is a lot of scope for interpreting such a "best explanation" which could lead to a far better experience in this world for us all, better joy and fulfilment, better cooperation, a better environment, a better destiny, if you like, than the fantastic and destructive imaginings of most theistic or deistic world-views involving the supernatural.
Nor do I see naivete in attempting to use our rational faculties and scientific facilities to come to a conclusion about the existence of higher powers. Why surrender the use and application of things we have so long struggled to acquire?

Steve's feedback also sparked comments by "Khalida":
    ....I kept reading down and my mind got caught on the post from Steve who suggests that the victims of the tsunami might have been "blessed" by some benevolent God who was ending the cycle of life and death for them. If an all-powerful, omniscient God really wanted to bless someone with the end of the cycle, why not just make them die in their sleep, or make them disappear from the Earth Rapture-style? Why make them suffer through such horrendous deaths first? These people drowned at best. At worst, they were beaten to a pulp against trees and cars and debris, or died of exposure, or hypothermia, over the course of hours or even days. Even after the tsunami, people died from lack of food, water, and shelter, or from terrible diseases.
    Generally when I give somebody a gift I don't beat them to a pulp and make them suffer terribly before bestowing it. But that's just me. I don't know about this "God" character, though.
    And if his "mysteries" somehow require that people die horribly - if suffering somehow purifies their souls - whose brilliant idea for a purification system was that? Surely a truly omnipotent, merciful God could have made Earth an eternal utopia - a utopia immune to the even worst mischiefs, sins, and errors of humans (such as eating forbidden apples).
    That is why I don't believe God exists. Or if he does exist, he is a sick, twisted bastard not worth worshipping.

E.D.: Strong sentiments from Khalida, and it's hard not to agree with them when one considers the horrors that God (whoever or whichever he is) seems to have inflicted upon us. The range of them is particularly striking. Two counter-arguments which theists regularly offer on the existence of evil in the world go something like this:
(1) In order to comprehend what is "good" we have to experience things which are "evil." God could not logically create good without creating evil. (George Burns said something like this when playing God on film.)
(2) It's all punishment for sin. God was forced to introduce evil into the world after the "Fall" of Adam and Eve.
     Well, there are a number of problems in these "explanations," but I will only address one of them here: the quantity of evil. First of all, one has to presume that neither disease or natural disasters existed before the Fall. (Which has its own complications, since Genesis says that God created all things, all forms of life, in the opening six days—before the Fall; so I guess we have to assume it was a matter of foresight.) In any case, whether before or after, God must have sat down and took counsel with himself as to what evils he was going to create. Perhaps his thoughts went something like this: Hmmm...natural disasters. How about earthquakes. Lots of death there. Better include undersea ones, so we get tidal waves to devastate shorelines. But maybe that's not enough. I should add hurricanes and monsoons. Let's see...tornados, that's a good one. Lightning strikes. Landslides...I'm on a roll here. Exploding volcanoes. Droughts. Wild animals. Insect infestations, locusts. I'd better write these down....
    Before we let God go on, we should look at an attendant problem in regard to natural disasters. Aren't these all part of the workings of nature? So one could say that they are not inherently evil. One could maintain that they are almost necessary in providing us with a world at all, although we might also ask whether God could have created a safer, more stable environment in giving us a place to live. If that was not possible, and if Adam and Eve had not fallen, would he not have needed to be constantly devoting himself to the task of protecting human beings from suffering or dying at the hands of the planet's complex of "natural disasters"? Food for thought.
    But back to God's catalogue of evils. Having come up with a hefty range of hazards of nature, he didn't stop there. Disease: what a potential this had, what with all the possible viruses, bacteria and what not he could come up with to attack the human body. One cou