Profit

If I hadn’t told everyone what I now think about everything, and if I weren’t so honest, I could have probably made a substantial profit and an easy living off of evangelical Christians who buy books and listen to music.

Much of the Happiness is Gone from my Life

NT

Book

I’ve started writing the book that summarizes my thoughts on all this (not the compilation of these essays – those are pretty much finished, rotting on my hard drive as I wait to PDF them).

Last night I spent 5 hours writing just the first three pages, and I fell asleep at 3 AM and went into work late.

I’ll get it done somehow.

Tracts

This is the tract that someone stuffed into my door a while back. In fact they stuffed one in the door and left one on the windshield, just to make sure I got it.

Kids. Kids burning in hell. A cigar-smoking kid who’s going to hell.

If you can’t grasp the world well enough to realize how this looks to other people, then maybe you can’t grasp the world well enough to realize other things too.

“There are Extremists in Every Religion”

Really.

Dear, non-believing secular humanist with a butterflies-and-roses left-leaning university degree in the humanities, I present you with a choice:

You must upload a Youtube video. In this video, you must show your face, and you must display your full name and address. Then you have to say either…

“F*** JESUS!”

Or

“F*** THE PROPHET MUHAMMED!”

I know which one you’ll choose.

I’m sure your white, anti-colonial professors would be proud.

The Rational Explanation

“There must be a Rational Explanation for this!” says the skeptic.

The believer chides the skeptic for calling anything surprising, new, or unsettling a “non-rational” explanation. It might just be the case that God, or angels, (or ghosts?) are a rational reality, and a rational explanation.

The skeptic replies that we must choose the most likely explanation: a non-supernatural explanation.

The believer replies that there is no way of telling how likely it is that God did a miracle, since that is not something you can calculate. If God exists, then the probability is 100%. If he doesn’t, it’s 0%. But that’s exactly what we’re trying to find out.

The skeptic says that with no proof of God doing miracles, but with plenty of examples of conventional explanations, we should believe the conventional explanation. It’s more likely in our experience.

The believer says that God is real in his experience, so…

Stop.

It is true, believer, that if something mighty unusual is reported, witnessed or described, then it is worth looking into it instead of doing backflips in an attempt to explain it using “conventional” means. If we did backflips all the time, we’d never discover new things, because we’d always be stuck in the old framework.

But it is not true, believer, that we should believe in something invisible, divine or unconventional if there is a perfectly good, normal, everyday explanation for it. And this is the real problem: almost all of the believer’s claims fall into this category. There is nothing remarkable, nothing unusual, nothing that can’t be explained in ordinary terms.

So we explain those things in ordinary terms. There is nothing willfully blind, nothing sinful, nothing rebellious about that.

All that other Stuff

Christians say that “you can be a Christian without [all that stuff you don’t like about Christianity and Christians].”

In the squared brackets you might find anything, from “believing in eternal torture” to “being a prude” to “having to believe in creationism.”

But you know what? You can also give up on religion without [all that stuff you don’t like about atheists and atheism].

Or most of it.

Busy

Onlookers sometimes express astonishment that there are all these intelligent, well-dressed people who go to church on Sunday and let ancient religions dictate how they feel about their business practices, their personal lives, and so on. It seems improbable, and it seems inconsistent.

But people are busy. You know, you have an engineer to take care of the engineering, a scientist to take care of the science-ing, a barber to cut your hair, and a rabbi or a priest to take care of religion. For some people, trying to sort through that mess is like trying to cut your own hair.

Love Wins

I finally got around to reading this, after it caused a stir last year. There is not much to say about it.

Rob Bell begins his book with some legitimate questions and legitimate observations. Then he spirals off into chapter after chapter of the evangelical trademark: voluminous, ambiguous, equivocal, saccharine, platitudinous prose.

There is nothing in this book. There are some questions to the effect of “how could God be like that?” followed by some weak rationalizations about how “he can’t be like that, he’s God! God couldn’t be like that!” (I agree, Rob) and then a bunch of stories about how the Matrix (sorry, Jesus) is all around you; when you go to church, when you take a drink of water, and so on. Right here, right now. Jesus. It’s a mystery. The magic of it all. Jesus is so much more than some simple doctrines. You can’t explain it. Can’t deny it. Jesus.

You cannot argue with a book like this, because it contains no arguments. It is something you read because you’re already a Christian, and it will make you feel a bit better about what you are already into. It has no value to anyone who has stepped, even briefly, outside of the paradigm. What can we do about this problematic doctrine of hell? I guess we can cast some doubt on whether the Bible really, truly means that there is a hell, like the church has always tended to view hell. Then we can talk about how good God is, because God is by definition “good,” and a hell-God doesn’t seem good to me, so it wouldn’t make sense if God were this other kind of God.

A great deal of circularity plagues that line of thought.

The fact that you can write a book like this and have it widely published is a testament to the low standards of the Christian bubble. You can be “Christian famous” just for thinking in complete sentences and having the discipline to put together a manuscript. Fortunately, there are lousy reviews of this book floating all around modern Christendom, many of them defending traditional notions, which will eventually force theological jellyfish like Bell to poo or get off the potty.

Comment Threads

Just because an original article or video is about a religious topic does not mean you have to debate the entire gamut of philosophical thought in the comment threads.

It is possible to limit the scope to the issues raised in the original material.