The Three Christs

What does it mean to be a follower of Christ? Broadly speaking, it means to attempt to emulate Christ and follow his teachings. However, this is not nearly so simple as it seems. There are, in fact, three Christs, each incompatible with the others. But what do I mean by this? Surely there can be only one Christ. It’s even part of the Nicene Creed – “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.” However, I hope that by the time you finish reading this, I will have convinced you that the Nicene Creed is talking only about one of the three Christs. These are: Christ the Man, Christ the Biblical Character, and Christ the Symbol.

Christ #1: The Man

Jesus of Nazareth was probably a real person. He was raised in Nazareth, gathered followers in Judea and Galilee, and was executed for treason by the Roman government. He is the seed which sprouted into the early Christian church, inspired the writings of the gospels, and is debated over endlessly by historians to this day. The unfortunate fact is that there is very little reliable information about this Christ. We have accounts of his life written decades after his death by his devoted followers, who had every reason to exaggerate, embellish, and otherwise enhance their accounts of him. These biased accounts cannot be accepted wholesale or uncritically. Even if you are a Christian, you must see that skepticism of these accounts is warranted. You would surely feel the same about similar accounts from any other religious movement. The other scraps we have about him outside the gospels tell us basically nothing, and most were probably influenced by the gospels themselves, whether directly or indirectly. We have no writings from Jesus himself, no first-hand accounts about him, no mention of him in records from the time of his life, and no archaeological artifacts that can be tied to him.

It is ironic, then, that the most real Jesus, the one who actually started what would eventually become one of the largest and most powerful religions on the planet, is the one we know the least about. This is not entirely surprising, considering who and what he was – one of the many Jewish messiahs executed by the Romans. He was a nobody, from a part of the world where literacy was rare and important events rarely happened, and it seems to be a matter of mere chance that the religious movement he founded happened to survive to this day instead of fading into obscurity like so many others did.

Christ #2: The Biblical Character

It was the early generations of the Christ the Man’s followers who were responsible for bringing us our second Christ. This is the Jesus of the New Testament – particularly the four canonical gospels, traditionally (and incorrectly) attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This Christ is not a monolith. Every author who tells us anything of his biography says something different about him, and these accounts are often contradictory. Nonetheless, the Biblical canon forms a concrete set of sources about the words and deeds of Christ which can be directly referenced.

In a sense, this is the Christ least open to interpretation. While one might argue over the motivations behind a certain deed or saying, or over which account of the crucifixion is accurate, this is a Christ we can reference directly and exactly. No matter what one’s feelings or historical methodology, we cannot argue that this Christ did not say “Blessed are the peacemakers,” or did not drive the moneychangers from the temple. Nor can we attribute to this Christ words or deeds not depicted within the Bible. There is, to a great degree, a sort of narrative bedrock in Christ the Biblical Character.

This Christ is, in some sense, the basis of our views of the previous Christ. Any speculations we might have about what Christ the Man may have said or done will largely be based on these accounts. To some, these Christs are nearly identical, for they believe that these accounts more or less accurately depict the relevant portions of Jesus’s life and teachings. Perhaps the gospels do not contain the exact words of Christ, they might say, but they capture the essence of his message. Perhaps there is some confusion about the exact deeds of Christ or their precise order, they may argue, but they are roughly accurate in their depiction of his life. However, such interpretations are, at the end of the day, not really pointing to Christ the Man, for Christ the Man is inaccessible to us. We have no way of knowing how much of his biography, as contained in the New Testament, is fact, and how much is fantasy. It is very likely that the majority of it is fantasy, for every retelling of the Jesus narrative provided an opportunity for the one doing the telling to exaggerate his deeds and place their own opinions into the mouth of the dead messiah. Also, we should consider the parts of the story that did not get told. A Jesus who came down with an illness or who was rude and uncouth would be less attractive to listeners, and so we can expect that the rough edges of Jesus the Man were worn away. In addition, a Jesus who was openly rebellious against the Romans would surely attract the ire of the same authorities that put him to death. It was in the best interests of the early church to make themselves appear as harmless toward Rome as possible, for the sake of survival if nothing else. Thus it seems the only remnant of the crucified rebel that survives into the gospels is the placard hung on his cross, which declared him King of the Jews. The vocal, and perhaps even violent revolutionary is whitewashed from the official accounts, replaced with a more gentle and sympathetic character. This also served the added purpose of aiding in the conversion of gentiles, as this Christ neither opposed them nor their authorities, making conversion a safer prospect.

In the modern day, of course, the Christ of the Gospels is discussed endlessly all across the world. This is an enduring Christ, immortalized in the words of the people who created him. This Christ has had a significant impact upon the world, and continues to do so. However, there is yet one more Christ to discuss, whose impact is even greater still.

Christ #3: The Symbol

Just as Christ the Man inspired Christ the Biblical Character, Christ the Biblical Character inspired Christ the Symbol. Unlike the previous two Christs, this is the Christ actually believed in and worshipped by Christians today, but the symbolism of Christ is not limited to Christians alone. People from all faiths, and those without any faith, often refer to this Christ in one way or another. This is the Christ who represents something. It is the idea of Christ. He is, in a sense, a living entity, constantly evolving, shaped by cultural attitudes and personal preferences.

I have yet to meet a Christian who fully embraces the Christ found in the gospels. Inevitably, some parts of the Biblical Christ are emphasized and prioritized over others. To some degree, this is inevitable, as the Biblical accounts are not completely compatible with one another, no matter what apologists and theologians might claim. However, even beyond this, Christians inevitably place more emphasis on some of Christ’s teachings than on others. Some focus on his warnings of hell and his harsh words toward the Pharisees, while others emphasize his love and compassion. To some, he is a feminist. To others, a chauvinist. To some, he is progressive, to others, conservative. Christ the Symbol can be used to promote or oppose any cause, any view of the world. He stands at once for everything, and for nothing.

In addition to the biographical information about Christ is added the teachings of other authors. Christ the Symbol is not limited to only the life and words recorded about him, but also the beliefs of his later disciples, or of his predecessors. What’s more, notions of Christ from outside the Biblical and historical record are often incorporated into his teachings, as well. The writings of church fathers, the values of the Enlightenment, Greek philosophy, and even ideas from non-Western traditions such as Buddhism get incorporated into Christ the Symbol. As a symbol, Christ is a melting pot into which any ideas can be thrown, and from which any ideas can be excluded.

While Christ the Man was a first-century Jew, Christ the Symbol can be of any race, nationality, or creed – whichever most appeals to the one creating him. As a symbol, Christ can be black or white, Asian or Hispanic, male or female. He can be “the least of these,” sitting among the prostitutes and sinners, or he can be the mighty king, setting up rulers and toppling nations. He can be the terrifying Other, coming to destroy, or he can be the closest of friends, there whenever you need him. It all depends upon how that symbol is constructed.

Christ the symbol need have no connection to the other two Christs. To many today, Christ is their version of the ideal American – white, blonde, wrapped in an American flag, and carrying an AR-15. To slaves in the antebellum South, Christ was the deliverer, the breaker of chains, and the one who would eventually take them to the Promised Land. To an embittered former Christian, Christ can be an anchor, granting stability to some, but holding back society as a whole.

Christ the Symbol is not just one thing, but anything and everything. He is a mirror of ourselves – made from what we love and what we hate, what we aspire to and what we fear. This is the Christ under whose symbol Constantine conquered. This is the Christ who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is the Christ who changed the world, for it is the Christ which resides within us. Christ the Man may have failed to overthrow Rome, and the Christ of the Gospels may be forever frozen in time, but Christ the Symbol lives on, shaping the world through the people who hold him up as a guiding beacon. Whether hero or villain, this Christ has shaped many of us into who we are, and is likely to last for centuries more to come.

Why the Failure of Petitionary Prayer Should Concern Christians

Have you ever prayed for something, but not gotten it? I know I have. This is probably a universal experience for anyone who has ever been a Christian for any length of time. Whenever someone calls this phenomenon “unanswered prayer,” though, apologists will be quick to correct them, saying that God answers every prayer, and that the answers are some variation on “yes,” “no,” and “wait.” Other atheists have pointed out that you can get these same answers if you pray to an inanimate object, and that your rate of “yes” answers will be the same no matter who or what you pray to. While this creates a problem for Christianity all on its own, it also creates a problem that I don’t see brought up all that much, and it’s this: Asking for forgiveness/salvation is no less a petitionary prayer than any other. If God’s track record with answering prayers for observable things is so spotty, then how can Christians trust God to answer their prayers for forgiveness of sins any differently? This is the question I want to explore in today’s post.

What does the Bible say about prayer?

Quoting and analyzing every verse about prayer would make this post intolerably long, so at the risk of being accused of taking things out of context, I’ll only go over the few that I consider most important regarding this issue. Let’s start with the words of Jesus:

Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

Mark 11:23-26, NIV

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.

John 15:16, NIV

Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

John 14:12-14, NIV

“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

¹¹ “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Luke 11:9-13, NIV

These and other similar verses all point in the same direction – Jesus claims that anything asked in faith will be given to His followers. Few (if any) conditions are placed upon how the requests should be made or what sort of requests are eligible. He just makes these blanket statements that anything that is prayed for will be granted to those who ask in faith. Clearly, this is very different from what people actually experience when they pray. But perhaps other places in the Bible will give us more insight?

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

James 5:14-16, NIV

James seems to back up what Jesus says, and even links healing miracles performed through prayer to the forgiveness of sins, so it seems pretty reasonable that God would treat both kinds of requests similarly.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

1 John 5:13-15, NIV

The author of 1 John seems to agree with the other authors, but he does add a caveat that the others have not – namely that God will grant whatever we ask for that is according to His will. He also links God’s answering of earthly prayers to gaining eternal life. Nonetheless, he still seems to assume that believers will know what requests will be according to God’s will because of the confidence he encourages them to have. Perhaps we can find a verse that will tell us what God wants? Jesus already told us He wants good things for us in the Luke passage above, but what about salvation?

I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

1 Timothy 2:1-4, NIV

So, according to 1 Timothy, God wants everyone to be saved and to “come to a knowledge of the truth,” which in this context I infer means He wants them to become a Christian. This is helpful to know. Combined with the passage from 1 John, this should mean that everyone who prays for someone else to become a Christian will become a Christian, right? Unfortunately, as my family members know all too well, this does not always happen, despite the Bible’s promise to the contrary.

The Problem

The Bible seems pretty clear in its message: Believers who ask in faith and in accordance with the will of God will get what they pray for. The Bible does not seem to support the notion that God answers such prayers with “yes,” “no,” and “wait,” but instead repeatedly claims that the answer to prayers from the faithful will be “yes.” Why, then, do so many Christian prayers go unanswered? Do no modern Christians have even the tiniest bit of faith? Are they praying for things that go against God’s will? Is God failing to follow through on His promises? Or could it be that He’s not really there at all?

Whatever the reason, God seems to have a lousy track record when it comes to answering prayers. For every supposed miraculous healing, there are many who are prayed for, yet go unhealed. People regularly die without becoming Christians, despite the prayers of their loved ones. So we have to ask, is God any better at answering the prayers of those seeking forgiveness of sins, or for salvation through Christ; or does He fail to answer those with the same frequency He fails to answer all other prayer requests?

This is no small problem. If Christianity is true, then the eternal fate of every human being rests on the effectiveness of prayer. If believers don’t have enough faith to move mountains, then they probably don’t have enough faith to have their sins forgiven, either. If it’s not God’s will that everybody should be saved (despite what 1 Timothy says), and praying won’t always change His mind, then some people are in serious trouble! If God is currently failing to keep his promises about prayers for earthly things, how can anyone trust Him to keep His promises about forgiving sins and bringing people to salvation? And if the reason God isn’t answering prayers is because He doesn’t exist, Christians are wasting precious time worshipping Him.

Whatever reason a Christian might come up with for why God fails to answer so many sincere prayers from the faithful can just as easily apply to the forgiveness of sins and the granting of salvation. The promises about God answering the latter are no more absolute than those about Him answering the former, and it seems they’re often paired together. So, to any Christian reading this, I have to ask: Will God answer your prayers for forgiveness with a “yes,” a “no,” or a “maybe?”

Is God an Abuser?

The moral character of the Christian God is the question which eventually led me away from Christianity. After a decade of non-belief, I still can’t help but look back to the time when I was such a staunch Christian and ponder the effects it had on me, and the effects it is still having on billions of people around the world. Recently, I’ve become more aware of abusive relationships and the tactics abusers use on their victims, and I thought I’d take a look at the behavior of the Christian God as described in the Bible and by Christians themselves, as well as general observations about the world, to see if God’s relationship with humanity, and especially with His believers, is a healthy one.

For the purposes of this analysis, I’ll be going through this article on WebMD for how to recognize if you’re in an abusive relationship. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in this blog post will be quoting this WebMD article. Before we get into the list of things to watch out for, let’s first define what an abusive relationship is. According to WebMD:

An abusive relationship will involve one party using their power over the other party to prevent them from doing anything except what the abusive person wants.

So, if the Christian God is using His power to prevent people from doing anything except what He wants, the relationship is abusive. Anyone who has read much of the Bible may already be noticing a red flag here, as so much of it revolves around obedience to God. Still, let’s hold off our judgment for now. Let’s see how God stacks up against this list of warning signs that your partner might be abusive.

Warning Sign 1: Communication Monitoring

People who are abusive may try to monitor your communication with other people. They may ask to read your texts and emails, log into your devices without permission, or even install tracking software to keep tabs on your social life. They will frequently use this against you later.

Well, God is not off to a good start with this one. Being all-knowing, He of course can’t help but monitor our every thought and word, but that doesn’t necessarily make Him abusive, any more than someone who can’t help but overhear a conversation is necessarily abusive. What really matters here is what God does with that information. Does He punish or shame people for thinking or saying things He doesn’t like, or does he allow people their private thoughts and conversations? Well, unfortunately, He does. In Matthew, Jesus tells us that merely wanting to sin is a sin in itself:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.

Matthew 5:21-22, ESV

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Matthew 5:27-28, ESV

But perhaps this is merely an isolated case? Perhaps Jesus (who Christians assure me was God incarnate) got this wrong? Well, we can find God defining thoughts as sinful elsewhere in the Bible. For example, the 10th Commandment (according to the Protestant count) reads:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Exodus 20:17, ESV

This commandment comes directly from the voice of God speaking from atop Mt. Sinai, and is repeated elsewhere throughout the Bible.

Furthermore, in Deuteronomy, God warns His people not to think a certain way, and outlines the punishment for doing so:

Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.

Deuteronomy 8:17-19, ESV

There are many more verses like this, but I think these should be sufficient to establish a pattern of behavior. God wants to control even our most private thoughts. He monitors what people think and say, and punishes them for thinking things He does not like, and with especially severe punishments such as death and hellfire.

Warning Sign 2: Isolation

Returning to WebMD, we find our second sign of an abusive relationship:

Abusive partners also commonly isolate the people they abuse. The abusive person may spread lies about you, or they may try to convince you that your family and friends don’t actually like you. Either way, the goal is to cut off your support systems that could otherwise help you leave the relationship.

Unfortunately for believers, God checks off this box as well. The first example of this that springs to mind is this statement from Jesus:

 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

Luke 14:26-27, ESV

Christians often argue that this verse does not mean that followers of Christ must hate their families and themselves, but rather that they ought to put their relationship with God above all others. Even if this interpretation is correct, Jesus is clearly calling for people to forsake their families for him if a conflict between the two arises, as we can see only a few verses later:

“So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”

Luke 14:33, ESV

This is also not an isolated text, but a general principle throughout the Bible. For example, in his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives this advice:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God…

2 Corinthians 6:14-16a, ESV

As a Christian, I was told that this verse was specifically referring to marrying unbelievers. This may be what the yoking metaphor is in reference to, or it may be that this is a more general admonition not to get too close to non-believers. Either way, God’s spokesperson says that God wants you to only have relationships with those of whom He approves.

In another epistle, this one attributed to James, we read this:

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

James 4:4, ESV

Here, the author says that if you’re a friend of the world (that is, those outside of Christianity), then you are God’s enemy. It seems that God wants His believers isolated from anyone who might lead them away from Him.

Of course, this message is not isolated to the New Testament, either. After Moses came down from Mt. Sinai and found the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, he ground it to powder, threw it into the water, made the people drink it, and then did this:

 …then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’” ²⁸ And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell. ²⁹ And Moses said, “Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.”

Exodus 32:26-29, ESV

Here we see that God approved of those Israelites who were willing to go so far as to kill their family members for Him, even granting them a special place in His worship. From this point on, only Levites could be priests in Israel.

Again, there are too many verses that fit this theme to include here, but this sampling should be enough to show a pattern of behavior.

I’d also like to point out that many Christians make a point of separating themselves from non-believers. Some go as far as shunning apostates, while others merely homeschool their kids or send them to Christian schools, and don’t get close to people outside the church. Christian alternative media is a thriving industry, providing Christians with a type of entertainment bubble that further isolates believers – especially children – from their secular peers. The effect of this is that many believers fear leaving Christianity, as it means they will become distanced from friends and family. When I left Christianity, I suddenly found my support network in tatters, and with very little experience of how to live outside the Christian bubble. I know that this is not the case for all Christians, but it is for many, and it seems to me that the Bible authors intended for this to happen. God wants His people isolated and dependent on Him and His other followers.

Warning Sign 3: Financial Control

In some abusive relationships, the abusive party will work to remove their partner’s control over their own finances. This is intended to make it harder for the abused person to leave the relationship. The abusive person may cut off your access to your accounts, hide information about your financial situation, or try to make you quit your job. 

Again, it’s not hard to find examples of God doing this in the Bible. I will broaden this slightly to include God controlling things of value other than currency, especially those needed for survival, because money was not as important in the Ancient Near East as it is today, and the real goal of financial control is to cause dependence upon the abuser for material goods.

I’ll start with the obvious: God’s demand for tithes and offerings. Despite being able to create anything He wants whenever He wants, God demands that His followers donate at least 10% of their income to Him. As we see in the following verse, God even considers it robbery to not give him this share.

 “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.”

Malachi 3: 8-10, ESV

Here we see that not only does God demand a significant portion of His followers’ material goods, but He also threatens to withhold things that people need unless He receives what He considers His due. This should not be mistaken for a tax, though. Unlike a tax, this money was not to be used for the public good, but was instead an income for the priests and a means by which God’s place of worship could be maintained. Moreover, as I pointed out before, this money was not something God needed in order to provide His people with blessings of plenty. If a government could build and maintain roads, support a social safety net, defend its people, settle disputes, and perform all its other functions without collecting taxes or otherwise taking money from the citizens, then it would be fair to expect that government to provide those services free of charge. Thus, any analogies to taxation cannot stand in this case.

The author of Hebrews (who claims to be Paul, but probably was not) says that God claims ownership over everything.

Everything belongs to God, and all things were created by his power…

Hebrews 2:10a, ESV

In Deuteronomy, Moses makes the same claim.

 “Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it.”

Deuteronomy 10: 14, ESV

Thus we see that God considers all your material goods to be His, and as we have seen, if we don’t use our wealth as He commands, he is willing to take it all away. This certainly fits the definition of financial control.

Of course, so far we have stuck mostly to the Old Testament. What does Jesus have to say about money?

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Mark 10:17-25, ESV

Here we see that Jesus demands that his followers be willing to give up all their material possessions to follow him, and that failure to do so means being unable to enter the kingdom of God. This story is repeated in Matthew and Luke with minor variations.

These passages should be enough to establish that God demands total control over everything you own, and is willing to punish those who refuse to give Him what He wants. We’re halfway through the list, and already God looks like an abuser. I wonder if this trend will continue?

Warning Sign 4: Coercion

Another common tactic of abuse is to force you to do things you don’t want to do, whether through begging, threats, force, or emotional manipulation. This can include sexual activities, but it can also include any other behavior you do not want to do. Abusive people may also use coercion to keep you in the relationship if you try to leave.

I really don’t need to quote any additional passages to prove that God does this, do I? Thus far, I think the case for coercion is quite clear. Still, just to hammer the point home, I’ll add some more examples.

Leviticus 26 is an entire chapter in which God promises to reward obedience and punish disobedience. Notice the ratio of rewards to punishments. By my count, God devotes 11 verses to rewards, and 26 verses to punishments. That’s about twice as many threats as enticements.

Huge portions of the Bible are devoted to God giving very specific commands, as well as laying out the punishments for breaking those commands. These can be primarily found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Of course the most famous of these are the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20, but there are hundreds more. One of these commandments is to not work on the Sabbath day (a commandment I note very few Christians even attempt to keep), and here is the story of what happened to someone who disobeyed that commandment.

While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation. They put him in custody, because it had not been made clear what should be done to him. And the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” And all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Numbers 15:32-36, ESV

Threatening death to anyone who does something as trivial as picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week is about as coercive as one can get… Or is it?

Many Christians like to point to Jesus as reflecting the true character of God, and the general perception of him is that of a gentle, mild, accepting sort of fellow. However, as we’ve seen already, Jesus is certainly willing to coerce his followers, even to the point of trying to control their very thoughts. Let’s see what other coercive things Jesus has to say.

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’

Mark 9:42-48, ESV

Here we see that Jesus threatens some pretty horrible punishments on those who sin. Unlike the God of the Old Testament, Jesus does not threaten people with punishments in the here and now, but instead in the hereafter. Christians debate exactly what this passage means (none of them want to take the entire thing literally, for obvious reasons), but it seems clear that Jesus is warning of dire punishments, such that drowning and mutilation would be preferable.

Of course, Jesus does not merely use threats to coerce his followers. He also uses guilt. For example, in the gospel of John, he says,

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

John 14:15, ESV

and a few verses later,

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

John 14:21, ESV

Here we see that God’s love is conditional upon obedience. Obedience means you love Jesus, and loving Jesus gets you love in return.

Of course, perhaps the most extreme example of coercion in the Bible might be the story of the Binding of Isaac. God comes to Abraham with a grim command:

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”

Genesis 22:1-2, ESV

Abraham then does what he’s told, keeping everything a secret from his family and servants until he’s alone with Isaac. When the altar has been built, Isaac asks where the lamb for the burnt offering is, and Abraham finally comes clean. Isaac then submits to being tied up and placed on the altar. Then this happens:

Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”

Genesis 22:10-12, ESV

Imagine the kind of trauma that must have caused for Abraham and Isaac! Here we again see that God demands such extreme obedience that His followers must be willing to kill their own children if He commands it. Even though Isaac was not actually sacrificed in the story, the fact remains that God wanted Abraham to be willing to do it, and blessed him for his obedience.

The case is clear. God is coercive.

Warning Sign 5: Emotional Manipulation

One of the most common types of abuse is emotional abuse. This can include:

• Insulting you
• Humiliating you in front of others
• Making you feel like you’re “crazy”
• Calling you names
• Making you feel guilty for normal activities

Healthy relationships involve both partners building each other up. Abusive relationships involve one party tearing the other down. 

Again, this seems to describe God’s behavior perfectly. We’ve already seen examples of this, such as Jesus making people feel guilty for the normal activities of feeling lust and anger, but let’s take a look at some others, just to be thorough. We’ll start with the first Bible verse I was forced to memorize in kindergarten at my Christian school.

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,…

Romans 3:23, ESV

I often hear Christians complaining about passages being taken out of context, but when you consider that this verse is not even a complete sentence, and that the Christians themselves decided to isolate this one from its context, you really have to wonder why they feel they have any right to complain. Let’s take a look at the context of this verse before going into an analysis.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:21-26, ESV

There, now we can see what the verse in question is talking about, and it is an excellent example of emotional manipulation. Here we see the dichotomy between God and humans perfectly outlined – God is righteous, and humans are sinners who have fallen short. Instead of punishing us for being sinners, God will show us mercy if we receive His gift of salvation through faith. This is the core of the Christian message, and at its heart is a permanent devaluing of humanity.

This point is even more clearly outlined a few chapters later:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— ⁸ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ⁹ Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

Romans 5:6-9, ESV

Here we see that God does indeed have wrath toward us, but He loved us so much that he had Jesus die in our place. All we have to do to avoid that wrath is accept the sacrifice of Jesus. Again, this is boilerplate Christianity, and it sounds exactly like the behavior of a domestic abuser. The abuser is angry with his partner, but he loves her (I use these pronouns only for the sake of simplicity, not to imply that abusers must be men and victims women.), but instead of hurting her, he hurts himself, then crows about how merciful he is. He didn’t deserve to be hurt, but he hurt himself in her place. Isn’t he so loving? Now, if the victim doesn’t want him to hurt her next time, she should accept his self-sacrifice and thank him and do whatever he says. Apparently the idea that God’s anger does not require that someone suffer and/or die is off the table.

I should point out that, at least in the Christian circles I grew up in and around, this guilt-tripping was often quite graphic and extreme. Films like The Passion of the Christ focus heavily on the suffering of Jesus in order to make the audience feel guilty. After all, it was their sins which made all this suffering necessary. This is a common theme of sermons and Bible studies.

So what happens if humans show any anger toward God? Does God admit He’s ever done wrong and ask for forgiveness? Let’s see how God responded to Job’s accusation that God had treated him unfairly. For context, Job was a righteous man who did everything God commanded and then some. To test his faithfulness, God allowed Satan to take away Job’s wealth, kill his children, and afflict him with a horrible, painful disease. Job rightly points out that he has done nothing wrong, and claims that God is mistreating him. God’s response is to appear in a whirlwind and ask Job if he’s as smart or as powerful as God. He berates Job for even asking why these things have happened to him. Here’s a sample of the sorts of things God says:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:

“Dress for action like a man;
    I will question you, and you make it known to me.
Will you even put me in the wrong?
    Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
Have you an arm like God,
    and can you thunder with a voice like his?

Job 40, 6-9, ESV

That’s it. God’s only answer to Job is pure intimidation. For chapter upon chapter, God belittles Job and boasts about Himself, until finally Job gives in and admits he was wrong. Only then does God leave him alone and bless him with more wealth and more children (as though they were replaceable).

Talk to Christian apologists and you’ll likely run into this attitude, too. “Who are you to question God? What right do you have to judge Him?” they will ask. This denial of human dignity and the assumption that God can do no wrong is at the core of the relationship between God and humanity.

And yet the emotional manipulation does not stop there. Returning to Romans, Paul has some more insults to sling at those of us who don’t think God’s as good as He says He is.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Romans 1:18-25, ESV

Apparently, anyone who dares recognize God’s abusive nature has a foolish heart, and is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. According to the interpretation of many Christians, this passage refers not merely to those who criticize God, or who worship other gods, but also to atheists. They use this verse to say that those of us who don’t think there is a God really know deep down that God is real, and we’re only refusing to see that because we’re inherently bad people. Note that this is emotional manipulation not only of atheists, but of any believers who might start to have doubts. “Only unrighteous people who purposely blind themselves to the truth would ever doubt God’s character or existence, and you wouldn’t want to become one of those people, would you?”

I think we can safely say that God is emotionally manipulative, adding a fifth warning sign to our tally.

Warning Sign 6: Physical Violence

Finally, physical violence is the most well-known sign of an abusive relationship. If your partner ever hits you or hurts you in any way, your relationship is likely abusive.

Throughout this analysis, we’ve seen plenty of examples of God committing or commanding violence against humans, but I’d like to highlight a few more, just to drive the point home.

And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Genesis 6:6-7, ESV

And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. ²² Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. They were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark.

Genesis 7:19-23, ESV

This is, of course, the most extreme example of God committing violence against humans, in which He wiped out the entire population of the earth except for 8 people. His justification for this was that the people were violent, and only thought about doing evil, but this is an obvious exaggeration. After all, there must have been many babies who had never had a chance to do evil things, and whose thoughts were nowhere near complex enough to even conceive of violence, but God killed them along with their parents. Even though we know for certain that this flood never happened, it still reflects upon the character of the Biblical God. If, as I believe, He is a fictional character, then this is indeed something He did within the fiction. If He is real, though, He has allowed this untrue story to persist in His holy book, so clearly He does not object to the way it portrays Him.

Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Leviticus 10:1-2

Here we see that God is willing to commit violence against those who worship Him the wrong way. This happened in public, too, and was meant to set an example of what happens to those who don’t do exactly as God says.

They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died.

Numbers 21:4-6, ESV

Again, we see God committing violence against people, this time for complaining. Now He not only kills them, but does so via venomous snakes! Later in the story, God does provide a cure for the snake bites, but not until many people had already died.

Ah, but these are all examples from the Old Testament! What about the new? Well, there’s violence to be found there, too. Let’s start with Jesus himself.

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

John 2:13-15, ESV

Here we see Jesus become so angry at people for conducting commerce within the temple that he attacked them with a whip and damaged their property. Apparently it’s okay for Jesus to get angry, but not anyone else?

Still, that’s not nearly as bad as some of the stuff from the Old Testament, right? Even if it is violence, Jesus did not kill anyone, right? Well, let’s look at one final example of violence in the New Testament, this time from after Jesus had ascended back into Heaven.

Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. ² With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”

Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”

At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

Acts 5: 1-11, ESV

Here we see that even in the New Testament, God is still willing to kill people for relatively minor infractions – this time for lying.

Of course, no discussion of God’s violence would be complete without talking about Hell. There are many different theological views of Hell, which can be broadly divided into three categories: Eternal Conscious Torment, Annihilationism, and Universalism.

Eternal Conscious Torment is by far the most well-known and widely-believed view on Hell. In this version, God intends to subject the vast majority of humanity to torture for eternity. Some describe it as a lake of fire, others imagine ironic punishments suited to the sins of those who suffer. Still others describe it as an empty darkness where each person is alone and isolated from everything good. Whatever the conception, God never intends for this suffering to end, and will not forgive anyone once they have died. This is the most extreme violence imaginable. Many apologists will argue that people send themselves to this kind of Hell, and that Hell is merely the absence of the goodness which flows from God. They will argue that this is the logical consequence of rejecting God. However, this is obviously not the case. As I write this, I am rejecting the Biblical God, and I am not being tortured. If rejecting God had the logical consequence of suffering, I would be suffering right now. This is more of that emotional manipulation we talked about previously, blaming the victim for the misdeeds of the abuser.

Annihilationism is the view that the torment of Hell does not last forever, but instead, the souls of the damned are eventually destroyed. Some Annihilationists believe in a swift and painless destruction, while others believe that people are tortured to the end. This latter doctrine is what I was raised to believe, and the thought of my non-Christian friends burning to death before my eyes haunted me. Annihilationism is significantly better than Eternal Conscious Torment, however, as the suffering does end. That said, it is still an act of violence committed by God against His creatures.

Finally we come to Universalism, in which everyone eventually gets into Heaven. Some Universalists believe everyone goes to Heaven immediately, and reject the notion of Hell altogether. How they square this with the scriptures which clearly reference Hell I do not know. That said, this is the only Christian view of the afterlife which does not involve God committing violence, making it significantly less abusive. However, other Universalists believe that some people will experience suffering for a time before being allowed into Heaven. In this view, the goal of Hell is punishment and reform, similar to a prison sentence. The exact nature of the suffering varies based on the view being espoused, but I have to say that this is the least-objectionable view of Hell I can think of. Whether it is abusive or not really depends on what kind of suffering is inflicted. Experiencing the harm you did to others during your life, for example, could be valuable in teaching empathy, and might even be a just punishment. Still, I hesitate to give God a pass on this, because, as an omnipotent being He ought to be able to reform people without making them suffer at all.

Given the nature of God as displayed in the Bible, I would not be surprised in the least to discover that He planned for Hell to be Eternal Conscious Torment. I would not even be surprised to discover that He would throw His own followers into Hell, given how cruel and unjust He is throughout the book.

Regardless, there can be no doubt that the Biblical God is physically violent, even toward His own worshippers.

Final Thoughts

I think the case is clear. God perfectly fits the description of an abuser. He checks off the boxes for all six warning signs discussed in the WebMD article. In each category, I could have listed many, many other scriptures to back up my case. There can be no doubt. The Biblical God is abusive, both to humanity at large and to those who have a personal relationship with Him.

Let’s take a look at the rest of the article to learn more about how we should handle this information.I’d like to draw your attention to this paragraph from early in the WebMD article :

While there are many common aspects of abusive relationships, every individual relationship will look slightly different. Furthermore, it’s often difficult for people in abusive relationships to realize that they are in one. One of the most common aspects of an abusive relationship is the abusive person insisting that what they do is normal and not harmful, making it hard for the victimized person to understand their situation.

This tells us something important, and that is that Christians themselves may not be able to recognize whether their relationship with God is abusive. My goal here is not to gaslight Christians or undermine their personal experiences, but rather to point out that it is possible to be abused without realizing that’s what is happening to you. If God is abusing Christians, they may not realize the harm He’s doing to them.

If you’re a Christian reading this, I commend you for getting this far, and I implore you to take a good hard look at your relationship with God. Is God respectful to you? Does He allow you to make your own decisions, or does He try to control you? Are you afraid of what God will do to you if you leave Him? Would you want to have a relationship with a human who acts the way God does?

If you think your relationship with God may be abusive, I’d like to share this advice from the WebMD article for what to do next.

If you are in an abusive relationship, your best course of action is to end it and leave your abusive partner. This can be scary, so it’s important to have a plan in place. Know where you’re going before you leave, and let your friends or family know that you are planning to leave your partner. You can also reach out to local resources for help if you need a place to go or help to get back on your feet. 

I will add that if your friends and family are believers, it may not be a good idea to let them know you are planning to leave God, as this may increase the danger for you. Think carefully about who you tell, and have a plan in place for what to do if the believers in your life follow God’s example and become abusive toward you. If you need help, I suggest taking a look at Recovering From Religion. They have a number of resources available to help those dealing with religious trauma.

I hope that all of you reading this remain safe and stay vigilant. Don’t let an abusive relationship – religious or otherwise – dominate your life. Be strong and stand up for yourself. You deserve true love and respect!

The Parable of the Burning House

Imagine that you come upon a burning building. Just as you’re pulling out your cell phone to dial 911, a man comes stumbling out the front door, carrying a small child in his arms. Coughing from the smoke, he staggers over to you and passes you the child. The kid is screaming and terrified, and you can tell she’s suffered some painful burn. You immediately finish dialing emergency services and summon the firefighters, an ambulance, and the police to the spot.

What do you think about this man? He’s a hero, right? He’s shown courage, putting his own life in danger to save the child, and even though the poor girl will live with the trauma and possibly the physical scars of her burns forever, she’s better off than if he’d just let her burn along with the house.

However, there’s more to this tale than meets the eye. It turns out that the house was equipped with security cameras, and the footage from these cameras is stored on a remote server. Somehow you get the chance to watch this footage, and what you see surprises you. Half an hour before you arrived on the scene, the man was in the house with the child, and he handed her a box of matches. He then tells her not to play with them, and goes outside. A shot from a different camera then shows the man watching the child through a window. Almost as soon as the man leaves the house, the little girl starts playing with the matches, and before long, to nobody’s surprise, she manages to light one. Frightened, she drops the match, and it sets the carpet ablaze, starting the fire that eventually consumes the house. Throughout all this, the man watches in silence. Even once the house has begun to burn, however, the man still continues to watch in silence. Only once the fire has grown large and begun to endanger the child’s life does he suddenly rush in, grab the little girl, and carry her out of the burning building.

Now how do you feel about this man? Is he as good a person as you first thought? If you’re like me, you don’t think this man is actually a good person at all. He handed the child the matches that resulted in the fire, did almost nothing to prevent the child playing with the matches, and only intervened at the very last moment, once the child and the house had been irreparably damaged.

If you’re familiar with Christianity, this story might sound very familiar to you. It is, in fact, a re-telling of the basics of the most fundamental Christian doctrines. God provides humanity with the means of performing sinful actions, tells them not to perform such actions, watches in silence as they sin, waits until humanity has been permanently scarred by the effects of sin, and then, far too late, swoops in to rescue people from sin and its effects, enduring hardship and suffering along the way.

This story illustrates the immorality of the Christian God in the clearest way that I think is possible. You could take every word in the Bible to be metaphorical and the point still stands. God created humans with the ability to harm each other, and placed them in a world where natural causes will result in their being harmed, even if that harm never comes at the hands of another person. Even if, as the fundamentalists argue, humans are the ones who brought suffering and death into the world by sinning, God still gave them the ability to do that, and did not step in to stop them before they succeeded in doing so. He watched, silently, as Eve (whether literal or metaphorical) ate the fruit (whether literal or metaphorical), and then waited thousands if not millions of years to send Jesus (literal or metaphorical) to be crucified and resurrected so He could fix things. Even now, two millennia afterward, humans are still suffering the effects of sin, without any sign of the utopia Christians promise. God hasn’t even managed to get us out of the burning building yet.

The question is, do you want to worship and celebrate a being who behaves in this manner? To be clear, this isn’t a reason to think there’s no God. There are plenty of reasons to think that the Christian God is not real, but this article isn’t about that. This is merely about the question of God’s character as depicted by Christianity and recorded in the Bible. If you would see the man in the story I told earlier as a monster – the sort of person you would want locked in jail for the safety of everyone else – then you should see God in the same light. Even if, for some strange reason, you don’t think that this analogy works because the moral principles that apply to humans don’t apply to God, you should at least be able to see that the Christian God is clearly not a being that has the best interests of humanity at heart. Whether God has the right to behave this way is really beside the point. Personally, if I had to choose between respecting God’s rights and the wellbeing of myself and my fellow humans, I’m going to pick humanity every time. What about you?

A Discussion of Value

Hi, Badventist here. I recently found myself in an argument with a theist about value. The details of this discussion do not matter, apart from the fact that this person believed that some things have objective value – that is to say, value which is independent of anyone to value them. I disagree, and would like to explain why.

Imagine, for a moment, that only one person exists in the entire cosmos. We’ll call her Shannon. The nature of Shannon doesn’t matter – she could be material, immaterial, a creator god or some mere accident of random circumstances. What matters is that she is a person, with at least all the mental capacities of your average human. Shannon places no value upon her own existence. She neither hates nor loves herself. She doesn’t care what happens to her in the slightest. Death or life – it’s all the same to Shannon. Shannon’s existence is, to her, merely a fact about the world, devoid of any deeper meaning than the color of a rock.

Now, does Shannon have value, and if so, what difference does it make? I think that Shannon would not have any value, but even if she did, that value would have zero effect on anything. Shannon would live her life exactly the same whether she had objective value or not, and would show no additional regard for her own existence if she had such value. Maybe Shannon could even come to discover (somehow) that she has objective value, but she doesn’t care about objective value, and does not change her subjective opinion about herself in any way. It seems to me that, in this case, having objective or intrinsic value makes no difference at all.

Now, let’s imagine someone else, also living alone in her own cosmos. We’ll call her Erica. Erica has no objective value, but she values herself subjectively very much. Even if she (somehow) discovered that she had no objective value or that her objective value was different from how she subjectively valued herself, Erica would not care, and would still continue to value herself subjectively to the same degree. Erica would live her life very differently from Shannon, would she not? Thus we could clearly distinguish between Erica, who has subjective value, from Shannon, who has none. If someone thinks they are valuable (or that they have negative value, for that matter), they will behave differently, and the world around them will be different as a result.

In what way, then, is something with objective value any different from something without it? It seems to me that objective value might as well not exist if it has no effect. Subjective value, on the other hand, seems to be extremely important, as it has a very large impact upon the real world. Ironically, our thought experiment with Erica has shown us that, unless objective value is subjectively valued, it is entirely useless. This seems to me to make objective value an entirely superfluous concept. Why not cut it out altogether and simply connect our subjective value straight into the thing being valued, instead of taking a detour through objective value?

So why do so many people seem to assume that objective value exists, or even seem emotionally attached to the idea in some cases? I think we tend to have an instinct that certain values are objective because they tend to be universally or near-universally held by human beings. Universality is often mistaken for objectivity due to the natural human tendency to affirm the consequent. If objective things are universal, then universal things must be objective, or so the flawed thinking goes.

I also propose that the popularity of the idea of objective value has to do with people wanting to attempt to impose their own subjective values upon others. After all, if you declare something to be objectively valuable, people who have not thought carefully about the topic may accept your declaration as fact, and force themselves to treat that thing as if it is valuable to them. Over time, it may even become genuinely valuable to them as they become more accustomed to assigning it value. Note that this effect is, however, only the result of belief in objective value, and does not stem from objective value itself. What matters in terms of the persuasiveness of an appeal to objective value is not the actual objective value of something, but the perception that something is objectively valuable. An appeal to objective value can be psychologically (though not logically) persuasive even if the object or concept in question has no objective value whatsoever, or an objective value that does not correlate with the value being claimed.

This, I think, is why religions so very often promote the idea of objective value. They want to assert that their deities, their beliefs, their holy books, their leaders, and their sacred objects are objectively valuable so as to further entrench their control over the faithful. This also allows preachers and apologists to paint skeptics of their faith as being unable to account for objective value, and since their religion’s moral philosophy relies on objective value, argue that said skeptics have no basis for behaving morally. Of course, as any decently-educated moral philosopher can tell you, this is absurd, since there are plenty of viable metaethical frameworks that do not rely upon the existence of objective value at all.

What do you think? Does objective value really exist, and if so, does it matter? Please, write your answers and replies in the comments! I look forward to reading your thoughts.

A Sermon Illustration For Atheists

Hi, Badventist here. When you go to church nearly every week for more than 20 years, you inevitably listen to a lot of sermons. One common element of a sermon is the sermon illustration – a sort of modern parable which may or may not be true, but which is plausible and which backs up the point the speaker is trying to make. One of these has stuck with me over the years, and I honestly think it’s more valuable from a secular point of view than it could ever be from a Christian one. I’d like to share that illustration with you as best I can remember it, and then discuss my thoughts about it.

The Illustration

A man was walking along the beach the morning after a storm. The beach was littered with starfish that had been washed up by the storm. The unfortunate creatures were surely doomed to die as the sun rose and baked them dry. Coming around a bend in the shoreline, the man came upon a young boy who was busy rushing about across the sand, tossing starfish back into the sea as fast as he could. Perplexed, the man watched this for awhile, and then approached the boy.

“Why are you trying so hard to save those starfish?” the man asked. “There must be thousands of them! Can’t you see that what you’re doing doesn’t matter?”

The boy picked up another starfish and tossed it as far out into the sea as he could before replying, “It matters to that one.”

My Thoughts

This story has stuck with me for years, while most of the sermons I’ve heard have faded into a muddled blur. I don’t remember what point this illustration played in the sermon, but I find that this short, yet profound story has a lot of great lessons packed into it, and I’d like to share my thoughts about it.

Often, I hear Christians assert that in a world without God, and more specifically an eternal afterlife, nothing we do really matters. After all, we’re all going to die eventually, and even if you manage to make some sort of impact on the world that is remembered for millennia, eventually all life on earth will be extinguished, the sun will go out, and the universe will experience heat death. Everything you accomplish will eventually be undone, so what’s the point in even trying?

I find that this story about the boy and the starfish serves as a perfect refutation to the sort of pessimistic nihilism Christians try to saddle atheists with. Who cares if my accomplishments are eventually erased? What I do today can and will have an impact on the world around me, for good or bad, and the people I help or hurt will care about how I treat them. I may not be able to make everyone’s life perfect, or even have a lasting impact on a single person’s life, but I do have the power to do something that will make their life just a little better in the moment, and even that small contribution matters.

This also ties in with Christian assertions about the nature of morality. After all, without a God to dictate what is right and wrong, what objective basis can I have for my morality? To that I say, who cares if I have an objective basis for morality! I have the ability to make the lives of others better or worse, and just as I’d like them to do what they can to make my life better, I’m going to do what I can to make theirs better. If I can provide comfort to someone who is hurting, or bring a smile to someone’s face, or provide material help to someone in need, even if only for a short time, it still matters. It matters to them, and so it matters to me.

Each human life may be only a tiny blip in the grand scheme of the universe. Even the longest human lifespan is nothing compared to the billions of years that have come before and that will come after. Ultimately, everything we do will crumble to dust and be forgotten. But that’s not what really matters. What really matters is the here and now, while humanity still exists and while we have the ability to make a difference in the little pocket of reality we inhabit.

Of course, I don’t want to denigrate philosophy or diminish the value of asking important questions about ethics and values, but I think it’s sometimes important to cut through the bullshit and look at things from a practical, down-to-earth perspective. It’s so easy to get caught up in the abstract that we sometimes forget to look around us and pay attention to the concrete world right in front of us, and the very real impact we are having on it, whether we realize it or not.

I want to challenge you, dear readers, to do something today that matters, not in the long run, but in the here and now. It doesn’t have to be something big. Pick up some trash on the side of the road. Hold the door for someone. Call your mom. Give some money to a homeless person. Give a bigger tip at a restaurant. Push a kid on the swings. Shovel your neighbor’s driveway. Whatever you do, know that even if your action holds no cosmic significance, it still matters to the people you’re helping.

A Challenge for Christians

Hi, Badventist here. One thing I’ve noticed about Christian apologetics is that apologists very rarely take into account the events depicted in the Bible when forming their defenses against the Problem of Evil. To briefly state the Problem of Evil, it goes like this:

If God exists, He is both able and willing to prevent all evil.

Evil exists.

Therefore, God does not exist.

The goal of the argument is to force one’s interlocutor to admit that no God exists which is both able and willing to prevent evil. In order to retain belief in God in the face of the argument, one must give up either God’s power, His moral perfection, or both. There are of course different ways of formulating this argument, and numerous ways apologists have tried to solve it. I’ve dealt with some of those in other posts, so I’ll avoid going into those here. Instead, in this post, I want to cut through all the philosophical technicalities and definitions and focus in on the Christian God as depicted in the Bible, and the moral character of that deity. No, I’m not going to be discussing Biblical atrocities or anything like that, as that ground has been trod many times over. Instead, I’m going to be using the Bible as a guide regarding the capabilities of God, and His willingness to intervene in the world.

The Challenge

So here’s my challenge for Christians: Name a single natural event, real or imagined, where someone is significantly harmed, that God could not prevent using the abilities He has used within the Bible. This can be some sort of natural disaster such as a flood, a crime such as a murder, a geopolitical event such as a war, or something else such as poverty or a disease.

Details of the Challenge

For the purpose of this challenge, I will assume that the Biblical God exists and that He has performed every act attributed to Him within the Bible. I may write as though I believe God exists, but this is only for the sake of convenience and entertaining the hypothetical. Any judgments I make about God’s character are with the understanding that I am judging Him as I would any other character I believe to be fictional.

I’m asking for a natural event so as to keep this grounded more or less in reality. Obviously, God can do miraculous things, but I’d like to avoid fantastic scenarios like a demon invasion or a supervillain using mind control powers, or something involving time travel. I’m asking about things that either have happened or realistically could happen without any kind of supernatural intervention.

I’m also asking for an event where someone is significantly harmed, because these are the sorts of events which the Problem of Evil is really concerned with. It’s common for apologists to strawman this argument by accusing counter-apologists of expecting God to take away people’s free will and prevent them from even thinking evil thoughts, or to coddle people and prevent every scrape and paper cut. Certain mental states are considered to be evil, as well, such as pride, lust, or hatred. That’s not what I care about here. I’m only interested in the important stuff that causes significant physical or psychological harm. I’m talking about life-threatening injuries, permanent damage to a limb or organ, death, serious pain, starvation, grief, trauma, etc. As a general rule, if you’d need to see a doctor or a therapist to deal with the event, it counts for the purpose of this challenge.

I will attempt to think of ways for God to solve the problems presented to me by Christians, using the abilities the Bible depicts God as using. As for the powers from the Bible I will consider as belonging to God, I will limit myself to post-Creation events from the Protestant Bible, and only powers used by God, His angels, or humans acting on His behalf. I will not be using powers from books which a significant proportion of modern Christians do not accept as authoritative (known as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books), nor will I appeal to supernatural events not attributable to God or His agents. For example, I will not use raising the spirits of the dead to speak to the living, as that feat was performed only by the Witch of Endor, who was not acting on God’s behalf. I will, however, consider the supernatural acts of God’s prophets, judges such as Samson, Jesus, and the apostles as possible. Some examples of these powers include sending dreams and visions and providing interpretations where necessary, walking on water, healing the sick, granting super strength, appearing in bodily form, knowing the thoughts of human beings, and granting animals the ability to speak. For any power I use in my response (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find where in the Bible the powers I’ve just mentioned can be found), I will cite a passage from the Bible in which this power is mentioned so that my readers can easily check my work. There may be multiple passages in which a given ability is depicted, but a single citation should be sufficient to establish that the power exists.

For the purpose of this challenge, God will not Himself inflict any significant harm on others – so there won’t be any smiting, bear mauling, infecting people with disease or anything like that. Moreover, God will not control the mind of any human (despite this being something He is depicted as doing on several occasions throughout the Bible). In other words, the solutions I provide must not include God doing evil Himself or violating anyone’s free will. Instead, I will stick to solutions in which God prevents the successful execution of harmful acts through non-violent means. This may involve some discomfort or frustration on the part of the person or people affected, but will not rise to the level of significant harm.

I will respond to any attempts to meet this challenge in a future post, but I’ll wait at least a week before publishing it to give people time to come up with their replies. You can reply in any way you like – in a comment, in a blog post, or even in a YouTube video, but if your response isn’t going to be a comment on this post, please post a comment linking to your response. In the unlikely event this thing blows up and I get a ton of responses, I may not be able to address all of them, or I may need to group similar responses together. Also, please respect my time when crafting your response. I’m looking specifically for answers to the challenge, and it shouldn’t require a 1+ hour YouTube hangout or a 10,000 word essay to outline one. It’s fine if you want to discuss other aspects of the challenge, but please clearly label your answer to the challenge so that I can find it and focus on it.

The Reason for the Challenge

I do not think that anyone will be able to meet this challenge. The Biblical God’s powers are vast (even if they are a bit inconsistently depicted) and quite versatile. But why make such a challenge in the first place?

Well, one thing I often run into is Christian apologists placing limits on God’s ability to intervene in order to prevent bad things from happening. They’ll say that God wants an orderly universe with consistent natural laws, or that God doesn’t want to violate free will. While these critiques might work with some sort of God, I contend that the Christian God, as depicted in the Bible, cannot be shielded from criticism by these defenses. Moreover, it might be the case that apologists exist (I’ve never met one) who would argue that there are certain powers which God simply does not have. This challenge is meant to use the Bible against such apologetics, as the fact that God has performed these acts in the past demonstrates that God is both willing and able to do these specific things when He considers it important enough to do so. Therefore, the only logical reason why the Biblical God (if He exists) does not perform such feats today is that He does not want to, and in my eyes, that makes Him evil.

Also, I find the mental exercise to be fun, in the same way I find hypothetical conversations about how one superhero might be able to beat another in a fight, or what kind of weapon should be used to defeat a particular fantasy monster, or what kind of plants or animals might evolve on an alien planet. This challenge will hopefully test my knowledge of the Bible and my ability to creatively solve problems, and there’s value in flexing those mental muscles.

I’m sure that if I get enough responses from Christians, I’ll eventually get a slew of irrelevant arguments that will miss the point of the challenge or ignore something I’ve already written. I can probably predict a few of them. There will be the accusations of my being arrogant because I consider myself worthy to judge God, the argument that I can’t even discuss morality without an objective standard and that God is the only way there can be an objective moral standard, the accusation that I’m placing myself above God and expecting Him to do my bidding like He’s my slave, and on and on. I may or may not engage with such comments, but I’m certainly tired of getting evasions instead of straight answers every time the subject of God’s morality comes up. Please, try to avoid going off on tangents and address the question at hand. If you think the challenge is invalid or unclear for some reason, I’m happy to hear honest criticism, but please try to stick to the topic.

Anyway, I hope I get some good responses! Let’s have some fun with this and see if anyone can stump me!

The Fundamental Failure of Religious Morality

Hi, Badventist here. I can’t sleep, so I thought I’d write something to occupy the time. It struck me as I was trying to fall asleep that there is a failure of religious morality which is extremely obvious, but which is rarely discussed.

Now, before we begin, I’d like to explain what I mean by the term “religious morality,” because the term has the potential to be misleading, and that is not my intention. I just can’t think of a better term for what I have in mind. I am not trying to say that all religions have the same moral system or that what I am calling religious morality is something that is common to all religions. However, it is a system of morality which is widespread enough that I cannot simply target specific religions, as I want to make general statements about all religions which use this form of morality. For the purposes of this post, religious morality is any system of morality which is dictated by a god. This can come in the form of direct revelations, through human representatives of the deity, signs and wonders, or the words of a holy text. Rather than secular moral systems, such as Kant’s deontology or the various breeds of Consequentialism, religious morality does not provide some kind of guiding principle which can be applied in any given situation to help determine the correct way to act. Instead, religious morality is guided by the mandates of a celestial authority figure, and can be entirely arbitrary.

This kind of morality is most easily seen in the “great” monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A classic example of this would be the story in Genesis where Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Let us say that a believer came along and discovered Abraham tying his son to an altar, clearly intending to kill him. What is this believer to do? If the believer were to question Abraham, Abraham would tell the believer that God told him to kill his son. Should the believer help Abraham? Keep walking? Pray for confirmation that Abraham’s story is correct?

This is where I believe religious morality ultimately fails. People of all religions agree that it’s possible to be mistaken about the will of their deity. How else could they explain heretics and those who practice other faiths? In addition, while religions often tend to give general guidelines about how to behave, any religion which follows religious morality must accept that there may be exceptions to any general principle laid out in the religion’s moral teachings. Normally, on Judaism or Christianity, it would be wrong to sacrifice a child to God, since killing is prohibited, and the God of Hebrew scripture often condemns child sacrifice (at least when it’s being performed for other gods). However, in the case of Abraham, it’s made clear that God wanted Abraham to at least make a genuine attempt to sacrifice his son.

So the question is: how can you tell, with any kind of reasonable degree of certainty, what the will of your chosen deity is in any given situation? If you come across someone about to do something which you would normally consider to be horribly wrong, should you pray first to find out if your god wants you to stay out of it? What about acts which are normally morally permissible? Once again, I’ll refer to the Hebrew scriptures. In 1 Kings 13, you can read the story of a prophet whom God kills for the crime of eating a meal. God had originally told the man not to eat, but then another prophet of God comes along and says it’s okay to eat. Not knowing he’s being lied to, the first prophet goes to the second prophet’s house and eats something, only to later be attacked by a lion on his way home for disobeying God’s mandate to fast.

Ultimately, the problem with religious morality is that you can never know, in any given situation, how you’re supposed to act. There is no guiding principle by which you can reason out what the right course of action is. You can pray or read your holy text or ask a prophet, but your god might not answer your prayer clearly, your holy text might not cover the particular situation you’re in, and the prophet you ask might be lying or mistaken.

Religious apologists such as William Lane Craig often like to argue that religious morality is the only true objective morality, and while it might be true that you can get an objective morality from such a system (after all, there are objective facts about what deities do and do not command, even if the commands themselves are simply based on the subjective opinions of the deity in question), such a morality is entirely useless within the context of the real world. Only in a world where the deity’s will was unmistakably clear in all situations could such a morality be of use for determining a course of action. If it is possible to misinterpret a holy text, or a sign from your god, or if it is possible for prophets to lie or be mistaken about what your god has told them, then morality based on the commands of that god is entirely opaque. It becomes unknowable, and thus impossible to work with under any circumstances. If those who ascribe to religious morality are correct, moral reasoning becomes impossible.

One objection I can anticipate to this argument would be that even in secular systems of morality, it is sometimes impossible to know what the right thing to do is. In Consequentialism, for example, one needs sufficient information about a given situation and the ability to accurately predict the consequences of each possible course of action before one can properly decide the correct course. The objector might try to argue that the weakness I have pointed out for religious morality applies equally well on Consequentialism. After all, the weakness in religious morality is simply one of lacking sufficient knowledge of the mind of the god in question, and a similar lack of knowledge can cause Consequentialists to make the wrong moral decisions.

To address this objection, I would point out that there is a fundamental difference here, in that a Consequentialist always has recourse to a reliable method by which to obtain the missing information they need to make the correct choice – that of careful empirical observation and scientific testing. Even if the method is too slow to help in any given situation, overall a Consequentialist can gather information such that, over time, their moral reasoning improves, and they make fewer and fewer mistakes. Someone ascribing to religious morality, however, could never do this, as the mind of their deity could change at any moment without warning, and no amount of empirical testing would be able to provide new insight into the mind of such a being, as deities have this nasty habit of remaining hidden from science.

Anyway, those were my thoughts on religious morality. I’d love to engage with my readers on the topic. Please comment and tell me what you think. Am I right? Do you see any flaws in my reasoning? I would welcome a thoughtful interaction with readers from any side of the debate. As always, I would that ye should know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Burden of Proof

Hi, Badventist here. I’ve recently read a blog post by OneSquareLight that brings up some common arguments and complaints about atheists that got me thinking. Though I won’t be quoting him or directly responding to any of his points, I will leave this link here so that you can see what inspired me to write this: https://onesquarelight.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/does-knowing-nothing-make-you-right/

Let me begin with a parable:

John tells Stacy that there is this great ice cream parlor not far from where she lives. Stacy, however, is skeptical, since she’s never heard of this ice cream parlor before, despite living near it for a significant amount of time. John then provides evidence that his claim is true by looking the place up in the phone book, where it shows the name of the ice cream parlor, its address, and the phone number. Still unconvinced, Stacy presses for more evidence. It’s always possible the phone book is wrong for some reason – a mistake, fraud, etc. So, to prove his point, John and Stacy call the number in the phone book, and immediately someone greets them, using the name of the ice cream parlor. Extremely skeptical, Stacy is still unconvinced, and so she and John drive down to the address listed in the phone book, find the ice cream parlor, and share a sundae. Now Stacy is convinced that the ice cream parlor exists.

What you’ll see here is an example of how skepticism and the burden of proof works. At the beginning, John had made a claim, and Stacy rejected it, citing her background knowledge as evidence that the claim was false. At this point, if John did not press further, Stacy would be entirely justified in believing that John was either lying or mistaken. Stacy was quite skeptical, requiring a high bar of evidence before she would be convinced of the truth of John’s claim, and her skepticism became less rational as time went on. This is not to say that Stacy’s skepticism was ever irrational. If, after seeing the ice cream parlor and having a sundae there, she still required more evidence to support John’s claim, that would be entirely irrational. However, over time, as more evidence supporting John’s claim began to pile up, and no evidence opposing John’s claim emerged, Stacy’s skepticism seems to have made less and less sense. If, on the other hand, John’s evidence had been poor – perhaps if he had simply showed her a hand-written note instead of a phone book entry and when they called the number they got no answer, Stacy’s skepticism would become increasingly rational in the face of the evidence.

So, how does this story relate to atheism and agnosticism?

I’m not a fan of putting agnosticism on a continuum between theism and atheism. It seems to me to be an independent descriptor, referring to whether or not you have knowledge with regards to whatever you’re agnostic about. So, if you’re agnostic relative to whether or not gods exist, that means that, whether you believe gods exist or not, you do not have certain knowledge that you are correct.

Imagine that, instead of talking about an ice cream parlor, John and Stacy were discussing the existence of God. Let’s say that Stacy has never heard about God before. At this point, she is an atheist, because she does not believe that God exists. She doesn’t even know what the word means. However, after John tells Stacy what God is, Stacy might be skeptical for the same reasons she was skeptical of the existence of the ice cream parlor – she’s never seen or heard about this “God” thing before, and thus her background knowledge serves as evidence that God does not exist. Stacy is still an atheist, and is rationally justified in being an atheist, since John has yet to provide her with evidence capable of overcoming her background knowledge.

At this point, Stacy is now a different kind of atheist than she was before, in that she has actually rejected the claim that God exists, rather than simply lacking a belief in God. While lacking belief in God was sufficient to make her an atheist, once she understands the concept of God, and yet does not believe that such a being exists, there is a burden of proof on her to justify that. However, her background knowledge is sufficient to meet that initial burden of proof, and so rejecting the claim at this stage is easy, and unless John provides further evidence, Stacy does not require any more evidence to maintain her non-belief. This is why we often say that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, rather than on the skeptic, because the skeptic’s background knowledge is sufficient to rationally justify the rejection of a claim.

Now, as John presents evidence for his position, Stacy’s skepticism will become less and less rational. If she wishes to maintain rational skepticism, she will need to either present evidence against John’s claim, or reject the evidence that John presents as not supporting his conclusion. For example, if John points to the existence of a pizza parlor near where he says the ice cream parlor is, Stacy can reject that evidence as not supporting the claim. After all, nothing about the existence of a pizza parlor necessitates the existence of a nearby ice cream parlor.

In the same way, skeptics of religion like myself often point out that the evidence theists provide does not support their claim that gods exist. If John says that the existence of objective moral principles is support for God’s existence, Stacy can counter by rejecting the existence of objective moral standards, by pointing out that objective moral standards could exist without God, or even both at once, and of course each point in such an argument would have its own burden of proof on both sides.

So, then, the question is whether atheists are making a positive claim or a negative one, and I would say that it varies from atheist to atheist and from god to god. For example, I consider myself to be a strong atheist with respect to the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, because this God has mutually exclusive properties and is entirely incompatible with observable reality. I am as confident in the nonexistence of said deity as I can be, and while still technically an agnostic in the face of radical skepticism, I think it’s safe to say that I know this God does not exist with as much certainty as I can know anything. In fact, I would go so far as to label myself an igtheist with respect to certain versions of this deity, as they are incoherent. However, there are other deities, such as the various deistic gods, which are not so easily dismissed, and I have to reject them solely on the basis of Occam’s Razor. For these, I would consider myself a weak atheist, merely rejecting the assertion that such beings exist based on my background knowledge and a lack of evidence or compelling arguments in favor of their existence.

If you will notice, my position acknowledges that there is a burden of proof on the atheist in the face of evidence. If God were to appear to me right now, give me a message, leave a calling card, and strike me with leprosy for my unbelief, I would be nothing if not irrational to continue in my atheism. Still, the initial burden of proof for the theist is very high, because the background knowledge of most people indicates that whichever version of the god concept they’re putting forward will necessarily be something they could not detect in their everyday lives. Gods are not as obvious as trees and rocks, and require strong support before it’s rational to believe in them. However, once presented with an argument for the existence of God, the rational atheist must either change their beliefs or find a flaw in the argument. If no theistic arguments succeed, then an individual’s background knowledge is sufficient to justify atheism. I think this is at the heart of the “lack of belief” kind of atheism one often hears talked about, and hopefully this shows how such a view is still compatible with accepting the burden of proof.

You’ll notice that, no matter what, though, the theist is always going to have to do the hard work. It’s on them to demonstrate the existence of their God, while all the atheist has to do to reject the theist’s claims is point out flaws in their argument. In most cases, the atheist need not provide arguments of their own to justify their position, because the existence of a deity is not obvious to everyone in the way that everyday objects are. Unless good evidence or a compelling argument arises, the atheist is free to reject the theist’s claims on this background knowledge alone. Now, sometimes an atheist might want to generate arguments or evidence against the existence of particular deities, or, if possible, against deities in general. If any of these is successful, the theist’s burden of proof becomes even greater.

Despite what certain disgruntled theists might claim, this is not intellectual laziness or any kind of unfair double standard. This is exactly the sort of standard we hold other claims to. For example, it is not obvious to anyone that the earth is an oblate spheroid, as evidenced by the fact that the shape of the earth had to be discovered by careful observation. The burden of proof is on round-earthers to justify their claims. The difference between believers in the round earth and believers in God is that the round-earthers have been able to provide compelling evidence for their position. Initially, it was things like how the length and angles of shadows differed from place to place, and the way ships disappeared over the horizon, but today we have photographs taken from orbit and complex physics models, too. All scientific and philosophical disciplines accept this burden of proof, and this is why these academic disciplines are legitimate, while theology is not.

Anyway, I hope that my voice might help to clear up any confusion. Comments, questions, and rebuttals would all be welcome. As always, I would that ye should know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Hi, Badventist here. Sorry about another long hiatus, but my inspiration for writing here comes and goes. Still, I’ve had this thought for awhile and it isn’t something I see discussed by atheists very often, so I thought I’d have a go at it.

The discussion is probably familiar to anyone who has debated Christian apologists before. You start by pointing out that the Bible does not accurately detail the creation of the universe, or even of the earth, or of anything, really, and then the more moderate apologist, rather than argue with you about evolution or cosmology, will grant you the point, explaining the accounts in Genesis away as metaphor or perhaps make vague gestures at some kind of day-age theory. They’ll sometimes even throw in a No True Scotsman and say that no serious/real/enlightened/etc. Christian really believes that Genesis is supposed to be a record of historical events (and never mind the millions of Young-Earth Creationists out there). Instead, they will say, those who really understand what God is will recognize him as the Ground of All Being – the reason that there is something rather than nothing, as if the phenomenon of there being stuff requires an explanation.

This argument has always puzzled me, because it’s so ridiculously silly. Let us imagine, or at least try to imagine, that nothing exists. Absolutely nothing. There’s no matter or energy or potential energy or laws of physics or anything. Now what? Well, God suddenly decides there should be stuff, and there is stuff, right? Hold on, just a second! Where did God come from? We were trying to imagine that NOTHING existed, right? Isn’t God something? The fact is that God cannot be the explanation for why there is something rather than nothing, because such an explanation must already be in place prior to God’s existing in the first place, unless the Christian wishes to suggest that God is nothing, in which case I believe the correct term for them is not “Christian,” but “athiest.” The fact is that you CANNOT appeal to something in order to explain the existence of all things, because in order for that something to explain existence, that something must already exist.

Well, maybe I’m not being charitable to the Christian apologist here. Maybe what they mean to say is that we need to posit the existence of God in order to explain the existence of non-God objects. We’re not really explaining why there’s something rather than nothing, but instead explaining why there’s something other than God rather than nothing. If God didn’t exist, then stop signs and birds and Old Spice and nebulae wouldn’t exist. Still, it seems that then we’re stuck with needing an explanation for why there’s God rather than nothing at all. Sure, I accept that if nothing except God existed that God could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the rest of the stuff we see (magic has no well-defined limits, after all), but if we need an explanation for why matter and energy and space and time exist, it seems that we would also need an explanation for any being capable of creating those things, and so the Christian has not explained the problem at all, but simply pushed it back. Even if God is an eternally existent thing, God’s existence still has to be explained, because the existence of nothing at all is still a possibility, so I would ask “Why is there God rather than nothing?”

It seems that ultimately, both the theist and the non-theist will have to take up one of two positions. Either it is a brute fact that something exists (the theist will of course posit God, and the non-theist will say that’s unnecessary and posit the universe), or there is something about the nature of nothing itself that allows it to spontaneously produce something.

Now, I need to point out that, throughout this discussion, I have been talking about a very specific kind of nothing. This is not what we normally mean by “nothing.” In ordinary language, if you tell me there’s nothing in a room, that can mean either that there’s nothing interesting in the room, but that there are still things there, or that there are no large objects in the room, with the understanding that there’s still stuff like air and dust and light and things like that. We’re not talking about that kind of nothing, because that kind of nothing is actually full of stuff – not just the air and dust and light, but also a bunch of energy and space-time and subatomic particles and things like that. Even in interplanetary space there’s radiation and subatomic particles. The closest thing to nothing physics has discovered so far is a quantum vaccuum, which is something I don’t entirely understand, but which Christian theists assure me is not the kind of nothing they’re talking about, since it still has laws of physics governing its behavior. The nothing we’re talking about has none of those things, and is in fact the absence of everything.

So, let us consider our possibilities, then. Either something has existed eternally – perhaps matter and energy in one form or another, maybe in the form of a multiverse, or maybe just the laws of physics, or maybe God – or absolutely nothing existed, and then we got something. Personally, I think that both options are quite plausible. Having at least one eternally existent thing would certainly be possible, and I see no reason to prefer nothing to something as the initial conditions for everything.

Still, let us consider that second possibility. In ordinary language, we believe it to be impossible for something to come from nothing. After all, we don’t see horses or jelly beans or golden eggs appear unexpectedly in our daily lives. However, as I’ve pointed out before, the nothing that we encounter on a regular basis is not the nothing we’re trying to consider. There’s matter and energy and laws of physics and space-time all around us, and these things provide consistent limits to what can and cannot be done. However, we’re trying to imagine absolute nothingness. I contend that, given absolute nothingness, it becomes almost certain that something will be spontaneously generated.

Before I can explain why I feel that absolute nothing will inevitably produce something, I need to explain what the laws of physics are. Obviously, the laws as we know them are merely descriptions of how reality behaves under any set of given conditions. Let go of an object with mass near the surface of the earth, and it will fall until it hits the ground, and eventually find a point of rest. Still, when speaking about the laws of physics in a context without people to describe those laws, we must not be speaking about the descriptions, but rather about the regularities inherent to reality itself. Without the laws of physics in this sense, there are no regularities to the way reality behaves. Without any regularity to the way reality behaves, then letting go of a massive object near the surface of the earth could cause that object to transform into one of the Beatles, and then the earth might turn into Nicholas Cage’s hair, and then 10,000 camels might spontaneously pop into existence, and then the camels might all accelerate to ten times the speed of light and begin farting tacos, and… well, I think you get the idea. Basically, without any regularity to reality, it is impossible to predict what will happen in the future.

Now, given this, when we consider a reality where absolutely nothing exists, we realize that it would not take very long at all before something, whether it be matter or energy or a law of physics, would come into being, and as soon as that happens, there ceases to be nothing. This will continue until consistent laws of physics exist, at which point something resembling the reality we’re familiar with would take hold. It might be very different from what we currently observe, but it would be a consistent sort of something that makes a lot more sense to us, and the insanity that is trying to imagine a world without some kind of consistent laws of physics goes away.

In short, then, God cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, for God Itself is something, and even if there were nothing, nothing itself is enough to explain the existence of a universe. Hence, believers must find a different gap to try to stuff their God into if they insist on maintaining their belief in It. This one’s been filled. As always, I would that ye should know the truth, and the truth shall set you free!