In Defense of Biblical Marriage

Here's a funny one. This classic skewering of biblical marriage has been circulating the internet for a long time. I love it, so I'm posting for anyone who hasn't seen it (yes, the two of you) and anyone who wants to enjoy it all over again.

The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government.

Any good religious person believes prayer should be balanced by action. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5.)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

Ah...good stuff. One of these days I need to confront a believer with this, along with a bible for quick reference. I want to see them squirm.

"Please god, help me! I'll go back to not believing in you tomorrow."

A coworker of mine was reading this blog and she raised the point to me about how many non-believers in times of crisis will instinctively call out to god for help. Her feeling was that these people are simply acting on impulses taught to them as children, either in Sunday school or by other adults. And she's probably right. From birth most of us are taught that god is out there and that he's just a thought-call away. We might make the conscious decision as adults to walk away from superstitious and religious beliefs, but under intense psychological stress these childhood beliefs could manifest themselves.

And I don't think it's fair to say that these reactions prove an underlying but ignored belief in god. If I were to find myself in agony, pinned under a building or something like that, I might call out for help. But in any normal situation I know what I believe. I think people in these situations are just desperate for someone to help them. If that means calling out to "god", then so be it.

And I think there's another, deeper reason even non-believers still seem to have some connection to a "higher power." I know this is a simplification, but essentially our mind is composed of two spheres, the conscious and the subconscious. Our conscious mind is our awareness, the part of our mind that observes and comments. The part that interacts with the world. Our subconscious mind resides just out of reach. This is where real thought happens. This is the part of our mind that accesses and processes information, sensory input, memories, and then presents its findings to the conscious mind.

The conscious mind has no access to the subconscious, generally. It only receives what the subconscious wants it to receive. Here's what I'm getting at.
when you have a thought it comes in a flash. A telling phrase is, "something occurred to me." You, your conscious mind, had nothing to do with gestating that thought. It merely heard the subconscious mind blurt it out. It's really almost as if our subconscious mind is a separate entity residing inside of us, communicating with us sporadically.

I think this accounts for people's feeling that they aren't alone, even in their own heads. Most people attribute "that still small voice" inside their mind to god, but in fact it's only you.

And since even non-believers live with the constant sense of "being with someone" inside our skin, we might instinctively call out to them in a time of need.

I'd ask you to pray for me, but what's the point?

SOURCE: Skeptical Inquirer, July/August '06, "One Big STEP: Another Major Study Confirms That Distant Prayers Do Not Heal the Sick." by Bruce L. Flamm


If you get the chance you ought to track down this article. I'll summarize.

STEP is a massive study into the efficacy of distant prayer. The results have been published, confirming what I've known for a long time. Distant prayer does nothing. The decade long study, involving researchers from six different academic medical centers found no statistical basis for the idea that distant intercessory prayer helps the sick get well.

The study involved 1,802 cardiac bypass surgery patients and randomly divided them into three groups. One group was told they may or may not receive distant intercessory prayer and ultimately did receive the prayer. The second group was told the same thing as group one, but ultimately did not receive prayer. Neither the patients nor the doctors new which of these first two groups were actually receiving prayer. The third group was told they would definitely receive prayer, and ultimately did. The prayer was carried out by one catholic group and two protestant groups.

Here's what the study found. There was no statistical difference between groups one and two. None the patients in these two groups knew whether prayer was being rendered on their behalf, and whether it was or wasn't made no difference to their health. Group three, which new it was receiving prayer actually fared worse than the other two groups. Funny, because they were definitely receiving prayer. You would expect them to fare better (if prayer worked) or, more likely, fare the same as groups one and two. The authors of the study hypothesize that this discrepancy might be caused by stress. Learning that they were going to be receiving prayer may have caused patients in group three to believe their condition was worse than it was; one that required prayer. This extra stress could have caused health complications.

The author sums things up in his closing paragraph. He says, "If prayer was a drug being tested for effectiveness, these well-designed studies would have destroyed it. A medication that failed this miserably in two huge randomized trials would never be approved by the FDA." (The other study being referenced here is MANTRA II, an earlier, smaller study that came to the same conclusions STEP has.)

But here's the hard truth. Christians don't care what the study proves. In their minds, it proves nothing. Bob Barth, a member of one of the protestant prayer groups said that his faith in prayer wasn't shaken a bit. He said, "People of faith don't need a prayer study to know that prayer works." And what do you base this knowledge on, Bob? Your own sense that your accomplishing something? Clearly not actual, confirmable evidence.

That's a textbook example of a human brain with its switch firmly in the "off" position. 1.) "I believe X." 2.) "But look, X is clearly not true. 3.) "But I believe it, so it is true." Christians can manipulate the universe to conform to their neat little prepared package. Even if god himself were to appear before them in a bank of the blindingest of all blinding lights, and tell them something in the bible wasn't true, they would find a way to discount the experience. After all, Satan can appear as an angel of light.

Not that converting Christians is the purpose of this study. Nor should the study be looked at as a way for thinking people to feel good about the positions they've taken. When conducting a study is this sort, an open mind requires that we prepare ourselves for the possibility that our hypothesis is wrong. And, using this study as an example, if we discovered that distant prayer had some effect on the health of patients, we would have to open ourselves to the possibility that some supernatural force was involved. Or at least some as of yet detected energy or other physical mechanism. However, I don't think we'll ever be in that position.

Jesus Christ, The Musical!

Not Jesus Christ Superstar...even better! Just a goofy flick to lighten the mood a little. I'll get back to bashing Christians in the next post. Proof that Jesus truly was the messiah: his beautiful singing voice.

Christianity and Christians: Are They Indistinguishable?

What funny timing. I don't really talk to anybody I used to know back in my Christian days. It's not that I cut them out of my life. I just slowly drifted away from them. We lost our common ground. Except for one guy. We don't talk often, but it's always to good to hear from him when we do. And oddly enough he called me after at least of a year of no contact just days after I started this blog. (To Christians: Evidence of God's involvement in our lives. To Atheists: Coincidence.)

I really like Steve (we'll call him Steve to protect his anonymity...and his pride, since his real name is Flogchortle Cheesemumbler.) I like his positive attitude and his general approach to life. He's truly live and let live.

After I got of the phone my girlfriend asked me how I could rectify having Steve as a friend while publishing this blog. Good question. I've thought about it a bit, and here's my answer.

I don't like Christianity. For that matter I don't like religion. Religion, dogmatic religion, is stifling and mind-constricting. It doesn't leave room for alternatives, nor does it leave room the possibility of being wrong and redrawing conclusions.

Spirituality on the other hand is great. I may not be terribly spiritual myself, but I'm totally open to the idea. Spiritual people, outside of the dogmatic realm, make up their own minds. They choose what to believe. And their belief system is flexible. It can evolve and change as life changes. It can inform an internal moral code without the need for fear and guilt-inspiring concepts like sin and punishment. Some of the most open-minded people I know are highly spiritual, while the most closed-minded people are usually Christians.

Here's what I think it comes down to. Like I said in a previous posting, the basic philosophy Jesus the man espoused was reasonably positive. His claims (or the early churches' claims) of messiah-hood defeated most of Jesus' message, unfortunately. But I think Christians that follow Jesus the philosopher, Jesus the rabbi, are far more spiritual than they are religious. And they are probably better people for it, not hypocritical, judgmental bigots. While following the moral code set down by Christian theology, they do it more out of a love for other people than out of fear of hell. Sure they believe in all the goofy stuff that goes along with modern Christianity. But that is all secondary to them. First and foremost is, "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," etc.

Flogchortle...I mean Steve, is a spiritual Christian. And I can respect him for that. He's applied his mind to what he believes. Maybe because he's my friend I'm biased, but I think that's true.

Plus. I just like Steve. I'd be just as much a bigot to hate someone for being a Christian as Christians are for hating someone just because they're non-christians, homo-sexuals, pro-choicers, whatever. Steve is a cool guy...except for his name.

Unmasking God as "The Man Behind the Curtain" for Intelligent Design

I was just reading an article about Intelligent Design. It's a valid theory...really! It's had just as much intellectual energy thrown at it over the years as Evolution. In fact, the ID theory been debated much longer, for millennia, because it's Creationism!

This will be a quick post. I just wanted to make one point. ID claims that life is so complex, with so many independently complex systems depending upon each other, it couldn't have been generated randomly. If you stumbled upon a pocket watch, something fairly complex, you would assume it had a creator. And life is more complex than a pocket watch by many orders of magnitude, so how much more would life require a creator?

Intelligent Design proponents mask their Christian puppet master by claiming not to know what or who the intelligence is behind the design. It could be extraterrestrials. Could be anything really. Okay. Let's say it was extraterrestrials, or any other finite being. Creature capable of creating life would have to be awfully advanced. Fine. Pocket watch...earthlings...earthling-creators. The ECs are even more complex than we are, so now they require a creator. You can see where this is going. How far into infinity do you want to travel?

The infinity progression has to end at some point. It must ultimately end at an entity that, although it is infinitely complex (it created everything) it needs no creator. The only entity that could conceivably possess those characteristics is god. Intelligent Design theorists knows exactly who their designer is.

And really that's where ID falls apart. The core claim is that anything very complex requires a designer. But god, IDs final designer is an infinitely (or at least immensely) complex being that has no designer. That's point one. Point two is if ID allows for a complex system or entity to exist that has no designer, why not simply say that life has no designer. Life is far less complex than a god character. ID negates itself by allowing exactly what it purports to deny.

Why are we here?

Okay, I'll grant you that's the most basic question in any philosophy. But I mean it more specifically. Why would god create us? What's in it for him? And does this point out a basic flaw in the creation story?

Here's the Christian version. God creates everything, divides the light from the dark, yadda yadda yadda...people. God plops mankind (all two of them) into a paradise on earth. He obviously intends us to be happy. Then there's the talking snake and the fruit salad, etc. but that's all superfluous to this discussion.

We are created to live joyful lives. What does god get out of this? The joy of knowing he has given life and happiness to another entity? I don't think so. If god simply wanted us to live and be happy he could have set up the system to allow that. There was no need for him to put the tree of knowledge in the garden. We didn't need to know good from evil. We could have been happy for eternity in blissful ignorance. No, god must have had something else in mind.

Christian dogma teaches that god created man to love him. This is why the tree was placed in the garden. Man, given free will, had to choose to love god. It had to be love freely given. God could have created creatures hardwired to love him. Essentially programmed...INPUT: sight of god...OUTPUT: love and praise for him. But is that real love?

Okay. He didn't create us for our sake. We wouldn't have noticed if we had never been created. He created us purely for his own sake. It's almost like a lonely little kid who creates imaginary friends to keep him company. The kid is lacking love, or companionship, or self-esteem. He or she is lacking something, and the imaginary friend helps fill the void.

Here's the issue there. God has no voids. God is perfect. That means he lacks nothing. So why does he need us to love him? He has no needs that require fulfilling. He can't be lonely. He contains and is all that he could possibly need. Really, that's a semantic foible. He can't even experience need. God is all-powerful. Need implies weakness. It says that the entity must rely on some outside influence to satisfy itself. It cannot self-satisfy. And as an all-powerful entity, "cannot" is not in god's vocabulary.

But let's pretend for a moment that god could exist with the above-stated flaw. He still doesn't need us. God already had a group of entities to praise and worship him. Angels. He created them before us (one can reasonably assume it was before the period covered by the creation story since the angels are never mentioned.) The difference between angels and humans is supposedly free will. Angels a programmed to love god, while we can choose not to. But what about Satan and the other fallen angels? Either god made them rebel and cease worshipping him (in which case he is directly responsible for evil in the world) or they chose to rebel...free will. I think the case for free will is stronger. In which case god doesn't require us to fulfill his desire for adoration. But this is ultimately a moot point. God couldn't exist with the flaws of need or desire.

So what are we left with? God didn't create us for our sake and he couldn't have created us for his sake. I'll leave the conclusions to you.

Greetings, and welcome to Christ-Inanity.

Why Christ-Inanity? Well, first off I love the fact that all you need to do is insert one letter and Christianity becomes what it truly is. Secondly, it encapsulates a basic truth. Christianity is inane. It is an affront to thinking, rational people everywhere. It, like most dogmatic religions has created a self-contained logic completely disconnected from rational thought. If you go swimming in their logic stream without a floatation device (your mind) things seem to make a certain kind of sense. Once you accept the basic premises, everything else follows. Unfortunately these premises aren't grounded in anything but faith, faith without evidence, and faith without evidence is the antithesis to real thought. I'll get into that in more detail in future posts.

Let me first tell you a little bit about myself and how this blog came to be. I was born Jewish, and while I still enjoy some of Judaism's cultural and symbolic elements, spiritually I am an atheist. I am not an agnostic. Although I recognize that no one can ultimately know whether god exists, I am firmly convinced that he doesn't. Granted this is a leap of faith. However, it's a faith solidly grounded in rational thought. I believe it because all the available evidence points to it. Not just because it's printed in a book that someone told me is true.

Here's the crux. There was one extra stop on my road to Atheism. For a couple of years in college I was a born-again Christian. I mean a full-tilt, tongue-speaking, witnessing-for-the-lord, evangelical Christian. It was my life. I destroyed my secular music collection, started talking to family members about hell and damnation, and spent a lot of time thinking about the rapture. This lasted about two and a half years. I was completely engulfed.

But something never quite felt right. I never felt completely comfortable. The more I thought about it I realized that my spiritual desires were at odds with my intellect. I couldn't get past many of the doctrines accepted as Christian dogma. Ultimately none of it really made sense. My doubt got stronger until eventually I was able to release myself from the bondage I'd put myself in. I began to take a new look at Christianity and I realized that Christians on the whole have done far more damage to the world then they've done it good.

Okay, back to the point of this posting. Of course faith is a basic element of all religions. And while having faith does often dictate a cessation of rational thought, Christianity is more insidious for a number of reasons. First and foremost, one of its basic tenets is that it is the only True religion, or more specifically that it is the only way man can actually reach the kingdom of god. This eliminates any meaningful dialogue between itself and other belief systems.

Secondly, especially in the evangelical segments of Christendom, it is commonly held that the Bible is the true, unalterable word of god. And generally this causes a literal interpretation of its contents. Since a good bit of the Bible, especially the "historical" sections are mythology, this leads to some pretty silly world-views.

Finally, Christianity has a rigid concept of sin. There are certain things god approves of, and a much larger list of things he doesn't. Do anything on list number two and you become a sinner, damned to an eternity of suffering. This concept of sin leads to two things, horrible guilt on the part of believers and often an association of the sinner with the sin. It causes a scenario which is very un-Christlike (if you accept that Jesus was just a noble guy with a good philosophy.) God teaches us to hate sin. Associate the sinner with the sin and believers begin to hate the sinner. We see this all the time. Look at the way most Christians view homosexuals (or course I think its ridiculous that god would care who you choose to rub crotches with, but that's a subject for another post.)

Take all three of these and you see the genesis for the worst chapters in Christian history. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, etc. 1.), You, non-believer, are a sinner. How do we know that? 2.) Our book tells us so, and it can't be wrong. 3.) Only we can help you. 4.) But you're a sinner, and god hates sinners. When Christians burned witches, they thought they were helping them...

Ultimately, taking a literal interpretation of Christian scripture is inane. I'm not saying that Jesus the teacher was a bad guy. He had some really valid points and lived a very noble life. If most Christians actually followed a "What Would Jesus Do?" lifestyle instead of worrying about sin, hell and redemption, Christianity might actually have something useful to contribute. But the majority of Christians don't. And this blog is about casting them out.