Yeah, I know the Christmas season is over, but have you heard the song “Christmas Shoes,” which came out about ten years ago? Patton Oswalt tore it up in a clever comedy bit (video, rated R), and he makes an excellent point about the illogic of what Christians tell themselves.
The song tells the story of a guy who’s in yet another long line before Christmas, not really in the Christmas spirit. Ahead of him in line is a grubby kid holding a pair of shoes. When it’s the kid’s turn, he tells the clerk his story, that he’s buying his mom shoes to make her feel better. She’s sick, and he wants her to look her best if she meets Jesus that night.
The kid counts out the price in pennies, and it turns out that he doesn’t have enough. So he turns to our hero who feels sorry for the kid and pays for the shoes. The story concludes:
I knew I’d caught a glimpse of heaven’s love
As he thanked me and ran out
I knew that God had sent that little boy
To remind me just what Christmas is all about.
It’s a sweet story, and lots of people filter life’s events through a Christian lens in this way to see God’s benevolent purpose behind things. But let’s analyze this to see how “heaven’s love” worked in this situation.
God sees the cranky guy in line. He gives the kid’s mom some hideous disease, puts the kid in line in front of Mr. Cranky, and makes the kid a little short on cash so that this Christmas miracle could happen. In other words, God needs to make someone die and leave a kid motherless to spread a little Christmas spirit.
Is that the best explanation for the evidence? Is that an explanation that a Christian would want? What kind of insane deity would do that? Perhaps good and bad things just happen, without divine cause, and we can use events in our lives to prod us to consider what’s important. We don’t need God and we don’t need to be a Christian to be delighted by life, find silver linings, and use everyday events to remind us of things to be thankful for.
It’s easy to reinterpret events through a Christian lens. It can be comforting, and it patches leaks in the Good Ship Christianity where reason leaks in. But this is simply a rationalization to support a presupposition, not an honest following of the evidence, and when you stop to think of what you’re actually saying, you’ll see that the reality you’ve invented makes no sense.
When Christians wonder why atheists get agitated, this kind of empty childish thinking is often the cause.
Consider another story. Suppose a girl sick with cancer throws a coin into a wishing well and wishes to get better. The net effect is that the girl is a little happier, like she took a happiness pill.
But this wishing well belief is just an ancient custom. We all know that wishing wells don’t really do anything. Should you break the news to her?
Few of us would. What’s the point? She actually does feel better, and she’ll have plenty of time as an adult to deal with reality. She has adults in her life who will protect her as necessary, shielding her so that she can hold this belief.
But as she becomes an adult, she must grow up. We leave behind wishing wells, Santa Claus, and other false beliefs as we become independent. No longer are the necessities of life given to us; as adults, we must fend for ourselves—indeed, we want to fend for ourselves. The parent who sugarcoats reality or keeps the child dependent for too long is doing that child no favors.
Reality is better than delusion, happy though that delusion may be. The doctor saying, “You’ll be just fine” feels a lot better than “You have cancer,” but if I really have cancer, which one allows me to take steps to improve my future?
Religion infantilizes adults and keeps them dependent. That’s a good thing for the 100-billion-dollar-a-year U.S. religion industry, but what is best for the individual—a pat on the head or reality?
Photo credit: seq
Here he gives us Exodus 22:29, which says, “Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons.” God’s demand of child sacrifice is often forgotten, but it’s good to be reminded of the basics.
Of course, the size constraints of eye black makes Twitter look like an encyclopedia, but these messages are worth parsing. This one is a nice reminder of God’s limitations. 2 Kings 3:26–27 tells of the end of a battle against Moab. The prophet Elisha promised Judah a victory. But when the king of Moab saw that he was losing, he sacrificed his son and future heir. This magic was apparently too much for Yahweh, because “there was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland.”
Another oldie but goodie. Psalms 89:7 says “In the council of the holy ones Elohim [God] is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.” How often do we forget that God is part of an Olympus-like pantheon? Ps. 82:1–2 gives a similar message.
You rarely see an entire chapter reference, but Leviticus 20 is a meaty one with a lot of good fundamentals. Everyone knows that homosexual relations are abominable, and verse 13 gives the death as the appropriate penalty. But it’s easy to forget the other demands of this chapter: eat no unclean animals (:25), exile any couple that has sex during the woman’s menstrual period (:18), death to spiritual mediums (:27), death for adultery (:10), and death for “anyone who curses their father or mother” (:9). It comes as a package, people!
Eye black references to divine genocide are common—1 Samuel 15:2–3, Deut. 20:16–18, and Judges 21:10 for example—but it’s nice to see this one. Deuteronomy 2:34–5 says, “And we took all [Sihon’s] cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.”
It’s time once again to check in with apologist Greg Koukl. In a recent podcast (“
Galileo Unchained 
