Category Archives: Christianity

10 Reasons the Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense

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Does God exist? You wouldn't think so given the bizarre crucifixion story.I’m afraid that the crucifixion story doesn’t strike me as that big a deal.

The Christian will say that death by crucifixion was a horrible, humiliating way to die.  That the death of Jesus was a tremendous sacrifice, more noble and selfless than a person sacrificing himself for the benefit of a butterfly.  And isn’t it worth praising something that gets us into heaven?

Here are ten reasons why I’m unimpressed.

1. Sure, death sucks, but why single out this one?  Lots of people die.  In fact, lots died from crucifixion.  The death of one man doesn’t make all the others insignificant.  Was Jesus not a man but actually a god?  If so, that fact has yet to be shown.

It’s not like this death is dramatically worse than death today.  Crucifixion may no longer be a worry, but cancer is.  Six hours of agony on the cross is pretty bad, but so is six months of agony from cancer.

2. What about that whole hell thing?  An eternity of torment for even a single person makes Jesus’s agony insignificant by comparison, and it counts for nothing when you consider the billions that are apparently going to hell.

3. Jesus didn’t even die.  The absurdity of the story, of course, is the resurrection.  If Jesus died, there’s no miraculous resurrection, and if there’s a resurrection, there’s no sacrifice through death.  Miracle or sacrifice—you can’t have it both ways.  The gospels don’t say that he died for our sins but that he had a rough couple of days for our sins.

4. Taking on the sin vs. removal of sin aren’t symmetric.  We didn’t do anything to get original sin.  We just inherited it from Adam.  So why do we have to do anything to get the redemption?  If God demands a sacrifice, he got it.  That’s enough.  Why the requirement to believe to access the solution?

5. The reason behind the sacrifice—mankind’s original sin—makes no sense.  Why blame Adam for a moral lapse that he couldn’t even understand?  Remember that he hadn’t yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so who could blame him when he made a moral mistake?

And how can we inherit original sin from Adam?  Why blame us for something we didn’t do?  That’s not justice, and the Bible agrees:

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin (Deut. 24:16)

6. Jesus made a sacrifice—big deal.  Jesus is perfect, so his doing something noble is like water flowing downhill.  It’s unremarkable since he’s only acting out his nature.  What else would you expect from a perfect being?

But imagine if I sacrificed myself for someone.  In the right circumstance, I’d risk my life for a stranger—or at least I hope I would.  That kind of sacrifice is very different.  A selfish, imperfect man acting against his nature to make the ultimate unselfish sacrifice is far more remarkable than a perfect being acting according to his nature, and yet people make sacrifices for others all the time.  So why single out the actions of Jesus?  Aren’t everyday noble actions by ordinary people more remarkable and laudable?

7. What is left for God to forgive?  The Jesus story says that we’ve sinned against God (a debt).  Let’s look at two resolutions to this debt.

(1) God could forgive the debt of sin.  You and I are asked to forgive wrongs done against us, so why can’t God?  Some Christians say that to forgive would violate God’s sense of justice, but when one person forgives another’s debt, there’s no violation of justice.  For unspecified reasons, God doesn’t like this route.

And that leaves (2) where Jesus pays for our sin.  But we need to pick 1 or 2, not both.  If Jesus paid the debt, there’s no need for God’s forgiveness.  There’s no longer anything for God to forgive, since there’s no outstanding debt.

Here’s an everyday example: when I pay off my mortgage, the bank doesn’t in addition forgive my debt.  There’s no longer a debt to forgive!  Why imagine that God must forgive us after he’s already gotten his payment?

8. The Jesus story isn’t even remarkable within mythology.  Jesus’s sacrifice was small compared to the Greek god Prometheus, who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity.  Zeus discovered the crime and punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock so that a vulture could eat his liver.  Each night, his liver grew back and the next day the vulture would return, day after agonizing day.  The gospel story, where Jesus is crucified once and then pops back into existence several days later, is unimpressive by comparison.

9. The Bible itself rejects God’s savage “justice.”  This is the 21st century.  Must Iron Age customs persist so that we need a human sacrifice?  If God loves us deeply and he wants to forgive us, couldn’t he just … forgive us?  That’s how we do it, and that’s the lesson we get from the parable of the Prodigal Son where the father forgives the son even after being wronged by him.  If that’s the standard of mercy, why can’t God follow it?  Since God is so much greater a being than a human, wouldn’t he be that much more understanding and willing to forgive?

If we were to twist the Prodigal Son parable to match the crucifixion story, the father might demand that the innocent son be flogged to pay for the crime of the prodigal son.  Where’s the logic in that?

10. The entire story is incoherent.  Let’s try to stumble through the drunken logic behind the Jesus story.

God made mankind imperfect and inherently vulnerable to sin.  Living a sinless life is impossible, so hell becomes unavoidable.  That is, God creates people knowing for certain that they’re going to deserve eternity in hell when they die.  Why create people that he knew would be destined for eternal torment?

But don’t worry—God sacrificed Jesus, one of the persons of God, so mankind could go to heaven instead.

So God sacrificed himself to himself so we could bypass a rule that God made himself and that God deliberately designed us to never be able to meet?  I can’t even understand that; I certainly feel no need to praise God for something so nonsensical.  It’s like an abused wife thanking her abuser.  We can just as logically curse God for consigning us to hell from birth.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for being unimpressed by the crucifixion story.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Religion: Billions into a Black Hole

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Religion is a hugely costly machine, but what does it produce?  Let’s compare religion to a big corporation since we know how those work.

Graph argues that corporations provide more value for the money input than religions.
Take General Motors (on the left of the red revenue scale in the figure above).  In 2010, U.S. sales were $73 billion, and that bought three million vehicles.  Pretty simple—$73 billion goes in and three million vehicles comes out.

We can peek inside to see where the money goes.  Of the incoming revenue, 87% went to automotive cost of sales—manufacturing and materials purchasing.  Next, 8% to sales/marketing and G&A (General and Administrative)—the cost to sell the vehicles plus overhead.  The final 5% was profit.

Compare this to religion (on the right side of the revenue scale above).  In the U.S. for the same year, donations to religion were $101 billion.  But that isn’t the only input.  Few GM employees spend their free time selling or manufacturing cars, no matter how much they love the company, but religious believers do the equivalent all the time.  They volunteer in all sorts of ways for the benefit of religion: evangelizing, serving as deacon or pianist, doing repairs on the church structure, making food for potlucks and bake sales, and so on.  How much is this worth?  Multiply by a couple hundred million American Christians and we get an extra 50% of income (a very rough guess).

Where does the church’s income go?  We don’t know for sure.  The IRS grants tax-exempt status to qualified organizations in return for those organizations opening their books to show the public how they spent their money … except for churches and ministries.  All we know is that every year about $100 billion (plus a lot of volunteer effort) goes into a black box.

Obviously, personnel must be a huge cost—there are roughly 600,000 paid clergy in the U.S.  Buildings, land, and other capital outlays are another biggie—megachurches don’t just build themselves.

So, what’s the output?  This black box gets twice the input of GM; what’s religion’s equivalent of six million vehicles?

Nothing goes back to society through taxes.  Maybe 10% passes through to good works outside the church.  (Again, this is just a guess since churches’ books are closed.)  Maintenance of the congregation is another expense, and to some extent this is worthwhile—helping those in need and providing a community for the members.

The rest is the church’s equivalent of marketing—recruiting new members and keeping current members within the fold.  General Motors knows that customers of Buick and GMC vehicles won’t remain customers without ongoing marketing, and churches know the same.

And maybe that’s the best way to see religion.  Religion is a very inefficient route to charitable giving (imagine a charity with 90% overhead), and religion isn’t necessary to get the social benefit of community.  Those benefits could be provided without the inefficient machinery of the church.  Religion must be propped up with marketing as is done with Chevy and Cadillac (with an imaginative dose of fire and brimstone thrown in) to remind customers that they’ve backed the right horse.

GM doesn’t need faith to stay in business, but it’s the only thing keeping religion going.

Inspiration credit: Richard Russell suggested this comparison.

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Don’t Move the Goalposts

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Moving the goalposts is a logical fallacyChristian apologists often bring up unresolved scientific questions and usually conclude with, “Well, if you can’t answer that question, Christianity can!  God did it.”  For example:

  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • What came before the Big Bang?
  • Why does the universe look fine-tuned for life?
  • How did life come from nonlife?

Admittedly, there is no scientific consensus on these questions.  But a century ago, Christian apologists pointed to different questions if they wanted to put science in the hot seat: Okay, Science, if you’re so smart, how is heredity transmitted?  What causes cancer?  What caused the universe?

And centuries before that, Christianity asked, What causes lightning?  Disease?  Drought?  Earthquakes?  It used these questions to argue that Christianity had answers that science didn’t.

Not only is science the sole disciple that could provide answers, increasingly only science can uncover the questions.  That is, the apologist pretends to inform science of questions that science discovered itself.

If in hindsight “God did it” was a foolish resolution for the questions of previous centuries—the cause of lightning and disease, for example—why offer it now?  Why expect the results to be any different?  Wouldn’t it be wise to learn from the past and be a little hesitant to stake God’s existence on the gamble that Science will finally come up short?

What’s especially maddening is apologists like William Lane Craig putting on an imaginary lab coat and ineptly fiddling with beakers and turning dials, playing scientist like a child playing house.  He imagines himself strutting into a community of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, Christianity can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has finally come to bail them out of their intellectual predicament.  He imagines that he can better answer questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.

This reminds me of the fable about Science scaling the highest peak of knowledge.  After much difficulty, Science finally summits and is about to plant his flag when he looks over and sees Theology and Philosophy sitting there, looking at him.  “What took you so long?” one of them says.  “We’ve been here for centuries.”

Uh, yeah, Theology and Philosophy can invent claims, but Science does it the hard way—it actually uncovers the facts and makes the testable hypotheses.  It gets to the summit step by step along the route of Evidence rather than floating there on a lavender cloud of imagination and wishful thinking.  Religion is like the dog that walks under the ox and thinks that he is pulling the cart.

To the Christian who thinks that science’s unanswered questions make his point, I say: make a commitment.  Publicly state that this issue (pick something—abiogenesis or the cause of the Big Bang or fine tuning or whatever) is the hill that you will fight to the death on.  Man up, commit to it, and impose consequences.  Say, “I publicly declare that God must be the resolution to this question.  A scientific consensus will never find me wrong or else I will drop my faith.”

If the Christian fails to do this (or rather, when he fails to do this), he then admits that when his cherished question du jour is resolved, he’ll discard it like a used tissue and find another in science’s long list of unanswered questions.  That is, he admits that this is just a rhetorical device, stated only for show, rather than being a serious argument.

He’ll just move the goalposts.  Again.

Photo credit: Graham Ballantyne

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Can Christian Scholars Be Objective?

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Drawing of black handcuffs on an orange backgroundIn a 2010 book, New Testament scholar Michael Licona said that the zombie apocalypse of Matthew 27:52, where many of the dead came back to life after Jesus died, didn’t literally happen.  To many of us that’s an unsurprising observation, but this caused quite a controversy within the scholarly evangelical community.

According to Christianity Today:

[Norman] Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture.  He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it “unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism.”

“Recant”?  Is this the Inquisition?  Was Licona, like Galileo, shown the instruments of torture and encouraged to choose the correct path?

To be clear, the only objectionable item in Licona’s entire 700-page book was the reinterpretation of this one incident in Matthew, and yet he was pressured out of his job last month as professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES), and his position as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board was eliminated.  A single question about biblical inerrancy was, for some, intolerable.

We can try to see this from the standpoint of SES.  They have a purpose statement, which says in part that the institution assumes “the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures.”  Licona was likely asked to commit to this statement, and his book could be seen as a breach of this commitment.

These kinds of statements of faith are common, and I found them for Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and others.  I attended the International Academy of Apologetics this summer (admittedly an odd place for an atheist to be for two weeks, but that’s another story), and their statement of faith, binding on the faculty, said that the Academy “accepts the Holy Scriptures as the revealed and inerrant word of God.”

Let’s grant that a university can dismiss a professor for breaching a contract, even one so odd as this.  What’s rarely discussed is the consequence of these mandatory statements: they mean that Christian scholars at evangelical institutions are unable to be objective.  With their job on the line, their hands are tied.  They can’t always follow the facts where they lead.  The public pillorying of Licona shows the consequences of intellectual honesty.

This incident has opened my eyes.  Whenever I see or hear claims by Christian scholars, I will now wonder if a statement of faith applies.  The next time I read an article by William Lane Craig, for example, I will read it with the caveat that he’s bound by Biola University’s doctrinal statement that says, in part, “The Scriptures … are without error or defect of any kind.”  When he argues that the Bible is accurate, I won’t know if that’s really his honest conclusion or if that’s just his institution talking.

This even affects Norm Geisler, Licona’s chief accuser.  Geisler is a professor at Veritas Evangelical Seminary, whose statement of faith says, “We believe the Bible … is verbally inerrant in the original text.”

How can we take seriously anything said about Christianity by Craig, Geisler, or indeed any scholar who is intellectually constrained in this way?

Photo credit: Vectorportal

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Related links:

  • Bobby Ross, Jr. “Interpretation Sparks a Grave Theology Debate,” Christianity Today, November 2011.
  • Jeffrey Jay Lowder, “Christian NT Scholar and Apologist Michael Licona Loses Job After Questioning Matthew 27,” The Secular Outpost blog, 11/8/11.
  • Chris Hallquist, “The Mike Licona kerfluffle, and what it tells us about Evangelicals and inerrancy,” Uncredible Hallq blog, 11/15/11.
  • “Michael R. Licona,” Wikipedia.

On 11/11/11, Let’s Crank it to 11!

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An amplifier dial has volume numbers from 0 to 10 but it goes beyond to 11 (Spinal Tap)You only get one 11/11/11 each century, and today is it.  And if today is all about 11, it must be Spin̈al Tap Day!

The 1984 film This is Spinal Tap, a mocumentary of Britain’s loudest heavy metal band, has a scene where the lead guitarist explains why they’re so loud—the dials on their amplifiers don’t stop at 10 but go up to 11.  When the interviewer asks why they don’t just recalibrate the numbers so that 10 is the loudest, there’s a confused pause, after which Nigel repeats, “These go to 11.”

And isn’t every day Spin̈al Tap Day within Christianity?  Let’s look at a few areas where Christianity stares blankly into space and then repeats, “These go to 11.”

The Catholic Church is a great source of 11-isms.  To see immutable religion changing, look at the position of Jesus’s mother Mary within the Catholic Church.  By 1854 it concluded, without scriptural evidence, that she must have been born of a virgin herself and in 1950 that she couldn’t have died but must have risen to heaven.

Or consider Limbo, the place that’s neither heaven nor hell, where unbaptized babies go when they die.  The idea was discarded by the church in 2007.

The Trinity is always a fun topic.  The Jews in the Old Testament saw the move from polytheism to monotheism as foundational, but then Christianity (Judaism 2.0) invented the Trinity.  They had a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too problem in that they wanted to keep monotheism except that their “single” deity would be formed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  First off, we have a problem with language—can’t Christianity think of a better name for its god than “God”?

And if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the persons, what do you call the union of these into one god?  That is, Father + Son + Holy Spirit = who?  You need a fourth name.  Do you call it “God”?  But “God” is the one who created everything, and that’s supposed to be the Father.  The Father can’t both be the first person of the Trinity and the overall god at the same time.  You can use “the Trinity” as the umbrella name, but that’s an odd name for a monotheistic god.

There’s another way to see the problem.  Consider this passage:

I will gird you, though you have not known Me; that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me.  I am the LORD [that is, Jehovah], and there is no other. (Isaiah 45:5-6)

There’s nothing confusing here from a Jewish viewpoint, which was the intended audience.  Let’s ignore for now that the Old Testament uses several names, possibly for different gods (Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim), that are conflated when convenient.

The verse says that there is no other besides Jehovah.  If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Father,” this means that he reigns alone and the Trinity is no more.  But if Jehovah is a synonym for the Trinity, then it makes nonsense of the singular pronouns (Me and I) in these verses and confuses passages such as “Then [Jehovah] spoke to Moses” (Ex. 40:1) or “After [Jehovah] had spoken these things to Job” (Job 42:7).  The problem, of course, is demanding a Christian interpretation of a Jewish text.

Here are a few more 11-isms.

  • Why blame Adam and Eve for disobeying God when they didn’t know that that was wrong?  Remember that they hadn’t yet eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
  • Why does the Bible contain nutty superstitions like the one about how you can change the appearance of animals’ young by changing what they see when mating (Gen. 30:37–9)?
  • Why does God give no new science, even information as simple and life saving as germ theory or the recipe for soap?
  • Why was slavery in Egypt that big a deal when the Israelites promptly enslaved a tribe once they returned to Canaan (Josh. 9)?
  • How can those in heaven enjoy the experience when they know of the suffering of billions in hell?
  • If God deeply wants us to make it into heaven and belief in Jesus is mandatory, why is he so hidden?
  • And why would he get furious because we’re imperfect when that’s precisely how he made us?

I’ve read more sensible things in Alice in Wonderland.  As Thomas Jefferson said, “Sweep away [the priests’] gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies.”

Let’s end with an 11-ism video.  This one weighs the profound love Jesus has for us against that whole hell thing.


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An Inept Attempt to Defang the Problem of Evil

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The pale figure of Death rides a pale horse and holds a scytheIn an article titled “Turn an Atheist Objection to an Opportunity,” apologist Greg Kokul attempts to turn the Problem of Evil, often admitted by Christians as their biggest challenge, into a selling point for Christianity.

The Problem of Evil is this: how can a good and loving God allow all the bad that happens in the world?  The simplistic answers fail to explain the woman who dies leaving young children motherless, the child that dies a lingering death from leukemia, or the Holocaust.

Kokul begins by saying that he’s found a debating technique that turns this problem into a benefit.  Instead of being solely a problem for the Christian, he turns the tables on the atheist.

Evidence of egregious evil abounds.  How do I account for such depravity?

But, I am quick to add—and here is the strategic move—I am not alone.  As a theist, I am not the only one saddled with this challenge.  Evil is a problem for everyone.  Every person, regardless of religion or worldview, must answer this objection.

Even the atheist.

Of course evil is a problem for everyone, but that’s not what we’re talking about.  Kokul made clear that we’re talking about the Problem of Evil.  We’re talking about how a good and loving God can allow all the bad that happens in the world.

What if someone is assaulted by personal tragedy, distressed by world events, victimized by religious corruption or abuse, and then responds by rejecting God and becoming an atheist (as many have done)?  Notice that he has not solved the problem of evil.

The atheist hasn’t solved the Problem of Evil; he’s eliminated it.  A God who loves us infinitely more than we love ourselves and who stands idly by as rapists or murderers do their work is no dilemma for the atheist.  But, of course, the problem still remains for the apologist.  Kokul can’t simply Continue reading →