Jesus Was a Failure!: and Other Freethought Essays

By Galen L. Rose

“Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of evidence, logic, and reason, rather than authority, tradition, or other dogmas.”

These 126 short essays were all published on the ExChristian.net web site between November 2008 and October 2014. They deal with many, many topics, from the existence of gods, the soul, heaven, and hell, to Biblical prophecy, morality, science versus religion, the philosophy of Jesus, that odd attitude called faith, and much, much more.

In addition to the title essay, “Jesus Was a Failure!”, and the prize-winning “An Entreaty to Parents,” (2010 winner of the national Letter to the Editor Competition of American Atheists), the book includes, “Does the Bible Prove Itself?”, “If God Died, How Would We Know,” “Prayer and Insanity,” “The Mind of God,” “ Belief as a Moral Issue,” “The Problem of Good,” “The Games Theologians Play,” “Science Works,” “Jesus the False Prophet,” “The Fairytale Bible,” and several dozen others intended to prick the balloon of religion, especially Christianity.

The author, an articulate and outspoken atheist, turns religion upside down and inside out, dissecting the beast with logic and humor, simultaneously challenging believers and entertaining non-believers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483545868

Book preview

Christianity?

1 Jesus Was a Failure!

According to the Bible, Jesus’ primary mission on earth was to modify Judaism for the Jews, as their Messiah. In Matthew 15, for example, Jesus is quoted as saying: I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And, in Matthew 10, Jesus’ charge to the disciples is: Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Now, given that very few Jews converted to Christianity, so few that Paul later put the focus almost entirely on Gentiles (non-Jews), it becomes apparent that Jesus failed in his primary mission. But, not only did he fail to convert many Jews, he also failed to foresee that failure. Remember that in Christian dogma, Jesus is a god and can foresee the future: Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he (John 13:19).

Now, recall that the Jews were fully primed to expect a Messiah; they were told in the Old Testament that the Messiah would be one of them, a Jew, and would lead them to renewed greatness in the world. They should have been eager to accept a reasonably convincing candidate.

Further, Jesus was born into, and spent virtually his entire ministry in Jewish lands. He also took special care to act in ways which would fulfill Old Testament prophesies concerning the Messiah. In entering Jerusalem, for example, to accord with scripture: And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written (John 12:14).

Interestingly, the Gospels disagree on just what Jesus rode, but all were trying to make the passage fit what they thought the Old Testament called for. John says Jesus rode on an ass, Mark and Luke say he rode on a colt, while Matthew says he rode on both an ass and a colt … somehow.

The Gospels also claim that Jesus was regularly followed by great crowds of mostly Jews. For example, Luke 12 reads: In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all …

Tens of thousands of Jews must have been eyewitnesses to his sermons and miracles (if we are to believe the Bible). Yet, they were largely unconvinced. Many would have seen him turn water into wine, heal the sick, cast out demons, and resurrect the dead. Why didn’t the word travel like wildfire throughout the Jewish world of this miracle worker, a hero of their own, given all those eye witnesses?

According to Judaism.About.com, Jesus was seen as a false Messiah by the Jews in part because he was not an ordinary human being, as was prophesied, but claimed to be a son of god. Perhaps those early stories about Jesus and his miracles oversold him?

Whatever the reasons, so few Jews bought into the Jesus-as-Messiah story that Paul decided to concentrate on spreading the Good News to the Gentiles instead. Of course, the Jews’ rejection of Jesus doesn’t prove he wasn’t the son of god, but it should raise a very large red flag. Something very strange is going on here. Think about it: The son of god was sent to god’s chosen people and they largely rejected him, so god didn’t get what he wanted? How can such a story make sense to anyone?

According to the words of the Bible, it seems pretty clear that Jesus not only failed to convert the Jews, largely, but he also failed to foresee that he would fail. Does this sound like the work of a god to you?

2 The Amazing Power of Faith

FAITH: b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust. (from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary)

Religious faith is arguably the most powerful force available to man. With it, according to scripture, he can achieve anything, even the impossible. Faith enabled the 9/11 terrorists to believe there were several dozen virgins waiting for them in heaven. Faith enabled the Heaven’s Gate followers to believe they were highly evolved spiritually and that a space ship trailing Hale-Bopp comet was coming to spirit them away to a trans-human state. Faith enabled the Aztecs, Mayans and many other cultures to believe their human sacrifices would sustain the universe, guarantee good harvests, and/or allow them to prevail over their enemies. Faith enabled Harold Camping’s followers to believe that May 21, 2011 would be judgment day.

Jesus spoke repeatedly of the power of faith. … blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. (John 20:29) And, I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:23-24)

No, scientific experiments have not been able to confirm the truth of these statements, but isn’t it an even greater accomplishment of faith that hundreds of millions of people believe they are true anyway? Doesn’t that conclusively demonstrate the enormous power of faith, that millions can still believe something despite the failure of experiment and a complete lack of evidence?

And, when that mountain doesn’t budge, the faithful will see in that the proof they seek that the Lord works in mysterious ways; if god created human intelligence but doesn’t want us to use it to confirm his existence, isn’t that mysterious?

In fact, as some theologians have testified, Christianity absolutely demands faith because the evidence to prove its foundational premises does not exist. As Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of the Orthodox Church has written, ‘Unless I see I will not believe. This is how people who demand from us logical, tangible proof of the Christian faith often answer us, the faithful. But there are not and cannot be such proof, for the Christian faith is beyond the grasp of rational thought … Nothing in the Christian faith, be it the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ or other truths, can be proven logically: one can only accept them or reject them on the basis of faith. Voltaire said much the same thing nearly 300 years ago: Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe."

St. Augustine wrote: Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe. Clearly, Augustine understood the message of the Bible, that blind faith must precede religious belief. Bishop Alfeyev concurs, Of course, in the age to come we will see Christ face-to-face, but this is just another thing that we must believe in! For the time being we have been given the inner experience of the risen Christ, an experience that is stronger than any logical proofs or any physical seeing. These exalted religious teachers are telling us that if we focus exclusively on what we wish to see, then given time and a dedication to prayer, we will see whatever we wish to see. It is as Peter Pan said about flying; it only works if you have faith. If faith lets you see what you believe, then you can create your own reality without troubling about what is real or not real. Perhaps Nietzsche was onto something when he wrote, Faith is not wanting to know what is true.

Bishop Alfeyev adds, The skeptical mind of contemporary man says: Unless I see I will not believe. But we say: I believe even though I do not see. If everything in religion were visible, tangible and provable, why and in what would we need to believe? If there were not any mysteries in religion, how would it be different from everything else in our earthly life? Isn’t he saying that it isn’t worth much if it doesn’t require faith to believe? How much better is it then, if your belief is without evidence? Outside of the scriptures, there is no authenticated historical proof that Jesus even existed since no historian of his time ever mentioned him. Doesn’t this just add to the mystery? How much greater of an achievement it is to believe in the written details of Jesus’ life when we can’t even prove that he existed!

Martin Luther, who obviously didn’t believe in half-measures, wrote, Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding. And Luther was absolutely correct. If you are to believe that the being who threatens you with everlasting torment actually loves you, then you must trample on reason. If you are to believe it was the height of moral action to drown everyone on earth except one family, then you must trample on common sense. If you are to believe that justice is served by sacrificing one of your children to torture and death in order to forgive the others for their transgressions against yourself, then you must trample on understanding. It follows that if you are to achieve and retain belief in a religion based on doubtful morality, contradiction, and miracle, then you must indeed trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

As Luther understood, faith arms the heart and mind against other interpretations, other possibilities. In effect, faith twists the mind into a Mobius strip, turning both sides into one side: turning dark into light, turning emotions into proof, turning wishful thinking into conviction, turning god’s murders into a service for the chosen, turning the condemnation of all the descendants of the first humans into justice, and turning the blood sacrifice of a son into a blessing on the remaining children.

Of course, some would argue that this kind of faith is dangerous nonsense which erodes human compassion and destroys the capacity for reason, but, for true believers, faith creates its own reality.

3 The Bible: Primitive Nonsense

Occasionally, the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses will knock on my door and offer their Mormon Bible, the Watchtower, or whatever. I wanted something brief to trade with them, so I put together the following 2-pager.

Christianity is based on the stories and claims of the Bible. If the Bible is not largely accurate history, then Christianity has no foundation. Thus, either the Bible is dependable, historical truth or Christianity is just superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

How could we prove the authors of the Bible were superstitious myth-believers and not skeptical, genuine wise men? We could begin by considering some of the creatures they wrote about in the Bible such as witches, wizards, sorcerers, spirits, ghosts, giants, dragons, sea monsters, satyrs, and unicorns. Modern science can’t come up with the slightest trace of evidence that any of these creatures exists or has ever existed. This stuff was just made up.

Other mythical oddities of the Bible include a talking snake, a talking jackass, a talking bush, 900-year-old men, a man whose super-human strength resided in his hair, three men who walked unharmed through fire, a man who lived three days in the belly of a whale, a wandering star which somehow led to a particular building, and a corpse which stood up and walked away after three days in a tomb. Were these stories just meant as metaphors? If so, wouldn’t the Bible authors have made this clear? After all, whenever Jesus spoke in parables, he announced it first.

Clearly, all this stuff was just made up. No half-educated adult living today, who was not indoctrinated in this stuff since childhood, could take it seriously or would consider even for a moment that this stuff is really history. Christians obviously use a double-standard when it comes to judging the Bible as history.

Jesus made up a whole bunch of stuff too. He claimed a true-believer could command a mountain to move and it would move (Matthew 17:20). He can’t. Jesus claimed that whatever one asks of him in his name, he will do it (John 14:13). He doesn’t. He also said he would return with the Kingdom of Heaven before all of his generation was dead (Mark 9:1). He didn’t. That was 2000 years ago. Are you one of those who are still waiting?

So, why is this stuff in the scriptures since it can be used to prove Jesus was making stuff up? Because Jesus and the authors believed the end of the world was coming very soon -- a message he repeated over and over. Well, the world didn’t end and all this embarrassing misinformation is still in the Bible. But many Christians don’t actually read the Bible and the others simply choose to ignore it. Often they will say something like, It’s in the Bible so I believe it. This is simply another way of saying You’re right, this makes no sense at all, but I believe it anyway. I’m just not going to think about it.

But at least the Bible provides sound moral guidance -- right? Wrong! Not once does God or Jesus or anyone in the Bible say a word against the practice of slavery. Some of the other moral wisdom of the Bible includes

Kill disobedient sons (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)

Kill those who work on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2)

Kill blasphemers (Leviticus)

Kill non-virginal brides (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)

Kill homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13)

Kill adulterers (Leviticus 20:10)

Kill witches (Exodus 22) -- where it clearly implied that they DO exist and they should be sought out. This statement, in fact, led to the torture and execution of thousands, maybe millions, by the Christian leaders of the Middle Ages.

Doesn’t it seem like an awful lot of killing was prescribed? Do you really think this is the best a wise, all-knowing, loving god could come up with? If the Bible is the Word of God, why does it strike us as so morally repugnant? All this stuff is primitive, brutal nonsense and clearly was just made up. If these commands constitute moral wisdom revealed by God, then shouldn’t our laws be based on them? Shouldn’t we be searching out witches and killing blasphemers, adulterers and homosexuals?

Note also that none of this wisdom of the Bible was ever overruled or superseded by Jesus or anyone else -- or could ever be:

The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Isaiah 40:8.

If the Bible is truly the Word of God, why is there no definite, unambiguous evidence of this fact in the bible? Why are there no scientific facts in the ancient Bible which would have proved it was revelation from God? There is nothing in it that was not generally known by literate men of that age, and there is a great deal of misinformation (Jesus thought disease was caused by evil spirits -- Matthew 8:16). Why wouldn’t God have put into it a few startling facts that no normal man of the time could have known -- like the earth goes around the sun, micro-organisms cause disease, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, etc?

In the face of such ambiguity, each religion has come up with its own holy books, and each depends on miracles like virgin births and faith healings and such. Why doesn’t God or Jesus provide unambiguous proof to each generation and all over the world? After all, man’s arguments over religion have caused the deaths of millions over the ages; how could a god who loves mankind just stand aside and allow this to happen? If the people of Jesus’ generation needed miracles to believe, why should we, living 2000 years later, be expected to believe with nothing but ancient, un-testable claims and the words of others to go on?

Yes, the Bible instructs us to just believe without questioning, but how can this be sensible advice if the Muslims and Hindus say exactly the same thing about their Holy books? If someone we don’t know says, Just trust me, shouldn’t we be suspicious?

As Sam Harris has written,

Christianity amounts to the claim that we must love and be loved by a God who approves of the scapegoating, torture, and murder of one man -- His son, incidentally -- in compensation for the misbehavior and thought-crimes of all others.

But, of course, this nonsense depends entirely on the testimony of the highly superstitious, primitive authors of the Bible. Doesn’t it matter to you whether the Bible is true? Don’t you care?

4 Of Rainbows and Jesus

It occurs to me that rainbows have a great deal in common with Jesus. When we see a rainbow, we see a magnificent, beautifully colored arc across a vast expanse of sky. It has the power to transfix one with its awesome presence, its beauty. It is clean, it is perfect, and the colors are always in perfect order.

For all of this, perhaps the most interesting thing about the rainbow is that it is not really there, up in the sky. Rainbows are seen by the eye when there is rain or much water vapor in the sky opposite the sun (the sun must be behind the observer and low on the horizon). The light from the sun is refracted (bent) within, and reflected by, the water droplets. Because the water droplets bend different colors (light frequencies) differently, the colors seen in a rainbow are always in the same order, top to bottom.

The refractions and reflections are just physics, of course, but take away the eye, the observer, and there is no rainbow. There is nothing up there in the sky but light and water droplets in no particular order. Further, if two people stand side by side, they will see two different rainbows since a rainbow’s arc is always centered exactly on the observer. Another interesting property of the rainbow is that if an observer moves toward it, the rainbow retreats an equal distance.

Some folks say there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But as we have seen, it wouldn’t matter if it were a pot of gold or everlasting life, one can’t move any closer to it, no matter how hard he tries, because the rainbow only exists in the mind. And, of course, it’s absurd to think that one could follow something that isn’t really there to its source.

5 The Fairytale Bible

The Bible is a collection of fairy tales. To some of us this is as obvious as the noses on our faces. In fact, to me it is one of the most amazing, mind boggling things about this world that millions of adults simply cannot see this obvious truth. True, the Bible begins with In the beginning… rather than Once upon a time… but not all fairy tales begin with those words, and the other parallels are just too striking to ignore.

Here is a definition from the WEB.

Fairy Tale: 1. A fanciful tale of legendary deeds and creatures, usually intended for children.

2. A fictitious, highly fanciful story or explanation.

A fanciful tale of legendary deeds and creatures? How about the creation of the universe in 7 days (whoops…the ‘all powerful’ creator rested on the 7th day – so call it 6)? How about a man walking on water and making food fall from the sky? How about a man curing illnesses and banishing ‘evil spirits’ with the wave of a hand? How about making a staff turn into a snake? How about an invisible superhero causing plagues of locusts and other such vermin? Oh, and legendary creatures? Well how about witches, wizards, sorcerers, spirits, satyrs, demons, giants, ghosts, dragons, and unicorns? Yep, they’re all in there.

And you want fictitious, highly fanciful stories or explanations? How about a flood that covered the whole earth to the highest mountaintop, killing all creatures which hadn’t been herded onto a single boat? How about a man with super strength which resided in his hair? How about a boy slaying a giant with a slingshot? How about a man hanging out in the belly of a giant fish for 3 days? How about 900-year old men and talking jackasses and bushes? How about a woman being convinced by a talking snake to eat the fruit of a magical tree? Yep, they’re all in there, too.

Please note that definition number one says, …usually intended for children. Therein resides the problem. If children were not exposed to adults insisting year after year that these ancient fairy tales are true, who would believe in them? These stories are all scientifically impossible and are so farfetched that only ignorant, primitive desert tribesmen, uneducated children, and the thoroughly brainwashed could take them seriously.

Clearly the Bible is merely a collection of fairy tales and should be catalogued and shelved with the fiction section of the library. But not with the other fairy tales, because so many of the Bible’s stories are too disgusting to be read by children (Abraham being ordered to kill his son, Lot lying with his daughters, etc.).

Amazing! It’s simply amazing that so many people really believe this crap!

6 On Death

Occasionally I will read that death must be terrifying for those who believe there is no God and no after-life. It makes death so final, so empty!

I guess I must be a little odd, because I find it a great relief that there is no everlasting life. Of course, anyone would be relieved on coming to believe there is no hell - but no heaven? Well, frankly, I cannot imagine anything that wouldn’t get boring after hundreds or thousands of years of it, especially groveling before some egocentric god.

So what is death? Well, functionally, all the evidence suggests the death of a human is merely the end of awareness for that human; he is no longer conscious. This doesn’t frighten me in the least because it happens to me every night when I go to sleep. And while I’m asleep, I don’t miss my family or friends or any of the other things I love since I’m not aware that they (or I) exist. There is no pain, no longing, and no sadness.

But aren’t I sad that I will never again get to see my loved ones, even in heaven? Sure, I’m a bit sad while I’m alive that I can no longer see those loved ones who have died, or talk with them, or be with them, but after I’m dead that will never occur to me. The pain of missing them will be over.

I will never be able to witness my own death because I will have no awareness at the moment I die. And because I will have no awareness, I will not miss life in the least. We cannot miss something we are not aware of, and from that moment, I will not be aware of ever having lived. Oddly enough, for me, once awareness is gone, even death will not exist.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love life. Although I am of the gray haired set, I still enjoy life greatly, and there are still things I hope to accomplish in this life. But at the same time, I see no point to fearing death. I won’t even know it has happened.

As Mark Twain noted, I was dead for billions of years before I was born, but I don’t recall it being of the slightest inconvenience. Similarly, I am utterly convinced that I will never experience my death as an inconvenience.

Kind of ironic, isn’t it? It seems that billions of people through the ages have accepted religion, and tenaciously clung to religion, for fear of something that they will not even be aware of once it happens.

7 The Stage Is Just Way Too Big

According to the Bible, we humans are clearly the crowning achievement of God’s creation. We are what it’s all about, the central actors, what it was all made for. But, there’s something terribly wrong with this picture.

Consider for a moment, if you were staging a play for a half dozen actors, would you build a stage four miles on a side for the performance? Wouldn’t this be a bit like building a universe several billion light years across and then putting your actors all on one tiny planet in the suburbs of a fairly average galaxy, revolving around a relatively modest star?

It is not easy to grasp how big the universe is. In fact, it is probably impossible to truly wrap our minds around it. But let’s try shrinking it down to a model so that we might just begin to get a feel for the immensity of this stage we are on.

Let’s imagine that our sun is the size of a typical grain of sand. If you put 1,000 of these grains end to end, they would measure about 1 yard long (or one meter, we are only approximating here). Now imagine laying out 1,000 such strings side by side, so that you had a sheet of 1,000 x 1,000, or one million grains. Now let’s stack 1,000 of these sheets one atop the other. Now we have a cube 1 yard (3 feet) on a side, containing 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000, or 1 billion grains of sand.

The Milky Way galaxy, in which we reside, contains (depending on source) somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. So, let’s take a midpoint and assume it’s 200 billion. In our model, then, our galaxy of 200 billion stars could be represented by 200 cubic yards of sand. Now, of course the stars are not really aligned edge to edge as in our model, but we are just trying to get a rough picture of what 200 billion of something might look like.

A typical school classroom might be something like 21 feet wide, by 30 feet long, by 9 feet high. This would amount to 210 cubic yards. Close enough. So, if you fill this typical classroom with sand, it would contain roughly 200 billion grains (stars), and our star, the sun, is just one of those grains. Just one.

And as the infomercial says, But that’s not all! Astronomers’ estimates of the number of galaxies in the universe range from about 100 billion to 400 billion. Let’s take the midpoint of 200 billion again (can you see this next step coming yet?). Now let’s return to our classroom full of sand, but this time each grain of sand represents a galaxy containing, on average, 200 billion or so stars. So now, our star is represented by one two-hundred-billionth of a grain of sand in a room containing 200 billion grains of sand.

Now that is a mighty big stage. But, of course, we have totally ignored the vast reaches of space in our example. In our model, to get distances correct, the nearest neighbor grain to our grain-of-sand sun (at 4.3 light years) would be roughly five miles away, and the distances between neighbor galaxies is typically millions of light years.

I will grant that you could legitimately quibble a bit with my estimates of the dimensions of sand, stars, galaxies, etc., but there is no escaping the essential fact that the stage is awfully, awfully big for our little play. In fact, it seems the ultimate in hubris to claim, as the Bible does, that it’s all about us. In the grand scheme of nature’s universe we may amount to less than a tick on an elephant’s ass.

[Note: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo of deep space also helps to give a feel for the vastness of space. This is an image of a tiny field of sky about the size of a dime at 70 feet, and vacant in any small telescope, yet it contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies.] http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/

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Postscript

Had I given this another day to gel, before submitting it, I would have added something like the following. And let this be a lesson to me to sit on a draft a day or two before firing it off!

We were given a major clue that we are not the stars of the show when Copernicus showed in the 1500s that the earth is not the center of the heavens (see ‘Copernican Principal’). The sun, stars, and other planets don’t all revolve around the earth, but the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun (technically, the sun and earth revolve around their combined center of gravity). Our sun is not the center of anything more than the planets, either, since the sun orbits the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is not the center of anything either. As Edwin Hubble showed in 1929, all galaxies except those in our local group are receding from ours, just as ours is receding from them.

[and this at the end]

Please don’t misconstrue the preceding and assume I am a nihilist. Just because we don’t matter to the universe doesn’t mean we don’t matter at all. My life matters a great deal… to me, because it’s mine. And that sentiment surely applies to all of us.

8 What a Fool Believes

Christian, show me one fact outside your moldy old holy book and outside yourself that your god exists; not a theory, not an argument, not a statement by some authority, but a fact that is verifiable. I’m talking about a DEMONSTRATION that your god is real.

There are other holy books which contradict yours so why should yours be believed and not one of the others, or none? And, all religionists will claim they feel the truth of their god in their hearts, the Christian, the Moslem, the Hindu, the Zoroastrian, etc., yet their gods conflict, so why should your feeling be believed and not one of the others, or none?

So, once we take away your old books and your feelings, isn’t it obvious that none of you has a single verifiable fact for the existence of your god – and you and all of your religious predecessors have had thousands of years to look. Yet, none of you can point to a single solitary fact, for if you could we wouldn’t be having this discussion; we would all be Jainists, or all Christians, or all Pastafarians, or all some single one of the thousands of religions which have come and gone through the ages.

Science has DEMONSTRATED the existence of many invisible things, like air and gravity and electrons, and has even produced fully fleshed out theories and equations which allow us to make testable predictions concerning these things. But when it comes to your god, you can offer no DEMONSTRATION. You say we must have faith. Not good enough. If you want us to believe in your god, then give us one testable, verifiable fact, please, just one. Without that fact, only a fool believes.

But, of course, you won’t listen. You never have. As the Doobie Brothers said long ago, …what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.

9 Make the Petitioners Explain

[When this was written, the State of Maine had very recently passed a gay marriage law. The law couldn’t take effect until 90 days after the close of the legislative session. So, of course, the religious Reich commenced petitioning to force a referendum to overturn the law. The following letter-to-the-editor was published in a local weekly newspaper.]

You will soon see petitions and petitioners everywhere asking for your signature to help bring Maine’s new gay marriage law to public referendum. You need to be aware that the people behind this drive are there for religious reasons. Because of certain words in the Bible, they think homosexuality is immoral. Most of us these days understand that the Bible is not an infallible guide to morality, but many others just don’t seem to get it.

While the Bible commands the death penalty for disobedient sons (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), adulterers (Leviticus 20:10), witches (Exodus 22), homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13), and those who work on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), most of us today understand that killing people for any of these reasons would in fact be immoral. And, anyone who murdered another for any of these reasons today would be sentenced to a long term in prison to protect the rest of us from their warped sense of morality.

I urge you to refuse to sign the petition until someone can explain to you why you should always accept the words of the Bible at face value, or, more specifically, how it would be a moral act to kill your neighbor because he works on Sunday. And don’t let him tell you that Jesus changed all that savage stuff; according to the famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself says, Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. He was obviously referring to the Old Testament laws.

I don’t have the space here to debate whether a God played a part in the writing of the Bible, but it should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has actually read it that the handprints of primitive, barbaric men are all over it. No God worthy of the name would think it moral to force a woman to marry a man who had raped her (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), and no rational God would waste words on a command to not eat lobster (Leviticus 11:10)

The petitioners may tell you they are opposed to the law because they are opposed to changing the definition of marriage, but they are being disingenuous. They are opposed because Leviticus 18:22 states that homosexuality is an abomination. And actually, changing legal definitions can be a very good thing. Over the course of our history we Americans have changed the definition of voter several times. In Colonial times, voter meant a white man with property. Later it came to include all white men, then white women, and finally African-Americans. And each time the definition changed we became a fairer, wiser, better society.

They may argue that homosexuality is unnatural, but homosexual activity has been observed throughout nature, in over 400 different animal species.

They may claim that some people simply choose sin by choosing to be homosexual. But think about it; if you aren’t gay, then exactly when and under what circumstances did you choose to be heterosexual? Like many a five year-old boy, I fell in love with my very pretty kindergarten teacher. I made no choice. We don’t choose who we are attracted to.

Equal rights for all citizens is a necessity for a truly enlightened society, and the right to marry whomever one wishes to marry should be enshrined in our laws as a basic moral principle… just like the right to work on Sunday.

10 A Letter to Christians on the Matter of Doubt

Many Christians suffer anguishing, debilitating fear their whole lives over the doubts they just can’t beat down. They will have - they can’t help but have - serious doubts about some of the extraordinary stories and incredible claims of Christianity, but dare not entertain those thoughts. Often their pastors and parents drum it into them from the time they are knee-high to a grasshopper that to doubt God is to insult Him and invite His terrible wrath. They may teach that doubt is the favored strategy of Satan to undermine the faith of believers.

But, this fear really makes no sense. If there’s a God worth worshipping, one who can determine the course of future events, then that God must be sensible. It should be blindingly obvious that if there’s a God, then he gave you legs to walk with, ears to hear with, eyes to see with, and a brain to think with. No sensible God would give you a brain and then punish you for using it to the best of your ability. And what is there to fear? You can beat on the truth forever and it will still be the truth. You cannot change that.

To doubt is perfectly reasonable and no sensible God could fault you for it. All children are born with enormous curiosity. They are eager to learn how the world really works, and they ask questions constantly in their thirst to learn. Some of them grow up to discover wonderfully useful things about how the world works and make the world safer, healthier, and more enlightened for all of us. Doubt is the door they opened in order to achieve these advances. They doubted the current wisdom of things and we have all profited. For example, according to the Bible, disease is caused by demons. Modern medicine could never have gotten off the ground if someone had not doubted this. Without doubt there can be no learning and no progress.

Of course, the Bible says that you should believe whether it makes sense or not, that you must not trust your own reason. But, since the Muslim and Hindu holy books say the same thing, thus entrapping billions in false religions, this must be bad advice, at least some of the time. In fact, since no religion claims a majority of the world’s people, we have solid proof that this advice to never question a holy book fails most of the time for