You know what I love? I love it when I’m at the office, and someone vaguely familiar with their religion decides that it’s their duty to try and convert me to whatever bullshit they believe in at the time. Yes, there’s nothing in this world I love more than watching these people squirm when you start asking them questions their priest never really prepared them for. What’s the deal with Jesus and his intense racism? Why did he say he would return before his followers died, only to be a literal no show for over 2000 years?

Of course, most Christians have never met a guy like me. They’re convinced the message of Jesus is so good, that all you need to do is show up with a smile, a Bible, and a friendly “let me tell you about my pal Jesus” and presto, instant Christian.

How else can you explain this rather trite bit of advice on how to witness to coworkers, courtesy of Focus on the Family. The problem is, the act of proselytizing in the age of information is not an easy task. You see, the Internet is filled with annoying things like facts which tend to contradict fairy tales made up by ancient desert nomads.

Let’s examine just how helpful their advice really is, shall we?

1. Believe that God wants to save your co-workers.

In other words, convince yourself that your meddling in other people’s lives is something your imaginary friend wants, no matter how annoyed and angry they might be.

2. Be a good employee.

Does that count not spreading your nonsense bullshit to coworkers who know a lot more about your own stupid religion than you do? Usually, good workers don’t invite conflict by bringing religion in the fucking workplace, but I digress.

3. Think like a missionary.

In other words, be relentless about your message. Even if you’re on vacation, at work, hanging out with friends. Hell, you should even witness to someone peeing next to you in the urinal, because there’s nowhere Christ doesn’t want you to be pimping his totalitarian message, regardless of the general hostility towards it.

4. Fill in the gaps.

That means witnessing to people during what little time they have to take a break and relax from having to listen to annoying people talking to them all day long about shit they don’t really care about.

5. Put the Gospel to work for you.

Do you wonder why you don’t share the Gospel more than you already do? If every word out of your mouth isn’t serving Jesus, what fucking good are you?

6. Don’t forget to actually share the Gospel.

Yeah, don’t forget to read only the parts that you think they will enjoy, like this one from the Gospel of John:

“He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

Who isn’t going to listen to a positive, loving message like that, right?

7. Trust God with the results.

You might get a little discouraged as you continue to alienate your coworkers, but fear not, for you must trust, without any evidence whatsoever, that what you are doing is for their benefit. After all, some guy told you that same shit a long time ago before you really knew any better. These people may not have had the chance to have their minds properly shackled to whatever limited ideology you espouse. Poor them!

That’s it folks; all you need to know to spread ignorance, fear, and submission to authority is contained right there. So, what are you supposed to do when someone throws an uncomfortable fact in your face, like the lack of consistency in the Gospels, the provincialism of their supposedly all powerful deity, or even the fact that their God couldn’t even fucking read or write? Trust that the problem lies with you, and not the fact that a bunch of ignorant sheep fuckers felt it was their divine right to slaughter the indigenous people of ancient Palestine. But hey, the stories make you feel all fuzzy and warm inside, so they must be true, right?

Mother Nature can be a cruel, nasty bitch. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids; honestly, I could spend the whole day listing the many ways humans can be crushed, burned, drowned, blown away, or fall to their deaths. When these kinds of senseless tragedies occur (well, senseless to us as natural forces interact), people who still cling to Bronze Age beliefs can often find themselves wondering: if there is a God, what’s the deal with all this horrible shit that happens?

Enter the apologist*. His job is to convince you that your Omniscient deity, the one who supposedly is controlling this thing, isn’t the one who set in motion the long series of events that lead to your loved one’s demise. So, how do you square the round peg of religion? Why, you smash it with the hammer of faith, of course!

In short, it says that God is a god who apparently delights in suffering. It says that God is the sort of god who sends drunk drivers to kill babies, who burns down people’s homes, and afflicts random people with horrendous diseases like cancer.

Regardless of any potential “reason” such a god would choose to does this [sic] things, if indeed God had a hand in intentionally causing them to occur, then that God is not the God of the Bible.

That God is not worthy of worship.

That God is evil.

How is that not the God of the Bible? I’ve read the thing, and if he isn’t sending fire down from the sky to punish exiled Jews for complaining, he’s fucking over the Jews for not following his confusing and contradictory laws. While there are a few passages that allude to him being ‘love’ and other such nonsense, simply reading what the character does throughout the Bible gives one a pretty clear understanding of the kind of deity Yahweh is. This whole ‘God is love’ shit is merely the pressures of modern civility and ethics applied to an ancient death cult.

But there was no grander narrative behind these moments, no deeper meaning to be discovered if we simply read the signs correctly. They happened and there was a reason behind their happening, but that reason was mundane, not divine.

In other words, these things were not part of God’s plan.

Oh, so when shitty things happen, this wasn’t part of God’s plan, but when good things happen, everyone is supposed to fall on their knees and thank this supposed all powerful entity? Here’s the thing about ‘omnipotence’: everything is your plan. The spark that created the universe, the enzymes that formed the first lifeforms, and the actions of his creation would necessarily have to be part of it as well. See, omnipotence is one of those funny words that puts God in a bit of a corner: it implies that everything, both good and bad, are his domain. He’s not struggling, Zoroastrian style, with an equally powerful evil version of himself. No, evil is as much a part of omnipotence as good, and the two cannot be separated.

God’s plan is that one day He will make His dwelling place among His people to dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be among them and be their God.

So what the fuck is he waiting for if the world is broken and full of suffering? Seems like his followers have been waiting awhile in confused silence while they try to reconcile the cruelty of nature with their dogma of a loving God. Of course, all of this suffering and evil can be easily explained when you aren’t married to a fantasy that requires you to live a life of cognitive dissonance. Here’s an idea for you: there’s no one at the wheel, and there never was.

*(Update: The article no longer exists, and was never archived)

It ain’t easy being a Christian: sure, they might be the majority (for now), but every other day the faith is challenged by objective reality. While many Christians will scoff at the idea that their religion is in trouble, the truth is that countries like Canada, Sweden, and Australia are quickly shedding their religious coat in favor of a broader “spirituality” that doesn’t have to deal with the many inconsistencies or outright lies of organized religion. Over half of all Canadians, according to a recent survey, are convinced that religion does more harm than good.

Enter the Apologist. Their “job” is to try and defend their faith against the harshness of reality. Christian Apologetics have been around since the very founding of the religion; St. Paul was the first to begin the tradition when confronted by desert shepherds possessing some measure of skepticism. In the modern world, it’s much more difficult to defend the faith, and so a whole cottage industry has sprung up to meet the demands of increasingly skeptically-minded kids.

I spotted this article entitled “Top 10 Defences youth can give for their beliefs“, and I thought I might share with you the kind of “advice” they’re giving young Christians in a vain attempt to prevent them from leaving the religion in frustration. I think you’ll agree that any teenager attempting to use any of these arguments would be eaten alive by anyone with a moderate understanding of history or science:

1. How can you know for sure that anything is true?
Among your acquaintances are likely to be some people who don’t believe in truth. That is, they don’t believe truth can be known. However, that idea is easily refuted, as this fictional conversation in the 2011 novel, “The Quest”, illustrates:
It took a minute, but I finally realized what she was waiting for. “You’re saying that if I think that’s a true statement, then I’ve claimed to know something that is true….By saying truth can’t be known. I contradicted myself.”

Here the author tries to argue that if an agnostic claims that truth cannot be known, this itself is a truth-claim and the statement is therefore inconsistent. While it’s true that consistency is a desirable attribute of any philosophy, we have to examine what’s actually being argued instead of over-analyzing the statement itself. What is truth? How do we determine what’s real and what isn’t? Humans create models to explain the natural world, and while they can be amazingly accurate, there is still much to discover. We must accept that our understanding of the Universe is limited, flawed, but constantly improving. To claim otherwise is only possible when one sees the world through the arrogant prism of religion.

2. Is God a human invention?
A popular view these days is the idea that humans invented God in order to meet their needs and fulfill their desires. But it is at least as reasonable to believe exactly the opposite: that the innate desire humans have for God exists because there is Someone who satisfies that desire.

“Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles.”- Voltaire. The fact that we have a tendency to see patternicity, agency and intentionality has more to do with our environment than some invisible man in the sky. For millions of years, our ancestors braved a cruel, violent world which placed survival above skepticism. As a result, we’ve inherited brains susceptible to superstition, and the persistence of religion in a world of scientific discovery is an excellent example of this.

3. Doesn’t the Big Bang disprove Creation?
There is a common misconception that the Big Bang has pretty much eliminated the idea that God created the heavens and the earth. But the opposite is true. Former atheist Antony Flew, in his book “There Is a God”, explained that the Big Bang model eventually led him to believe in a God who created the universe, because it pointed to a beginning point in the universe, and to something (or Someone) behind that beginning that was too big for science to explain.

So the Universe needs a beginning, but Super-Monkey doesn’t? The best science we have now tells us that a Universe can indeed come from nothing, so while the science we have today tells us that the Universe requires no supernatural “party-starter”, religionists can’t seem to abandon this lost “first” cause. I won’t pretend to know for certain that a god couldn’t have done this; however, our faithful opponents have still failed to provide a compelling explanation of their deity’s apparent ability to transcend the law of causality. Lastly, this idea that something can be “too big” for science is just an invitation to ignorance.

4. How can an intelligent person not believe in evolution?

Atheist Richard Dawkins has famously written, “Beyond doubt evolution is a fact,” adding that no reputable scientist disputes it. However, neither statement is true. First, it is necessary to understand what people mean when they use the world “evolution,” because it can refer to both micro-evolution (the observable process by which change happens over time within species) and macro-evolution (the arguable claim that starting with a common ancestor, over time simple organisms have changed into the species that exist today). Macro-evolution is not as widely accepted as some claim. In fact, more than eight hundred world-class scientists have signed a formal dissent from Darwinian evolution.

So, you’re willing to accept that species gradually change over time, but somehow still can’t grasp that over geological time-frames (millions of years), these incremental changes would form entirely new species? Also, if you want to put this whole “over 800 scientists express doubt about evolution” number into perspective, there are currently over a million scientists working in the US alone. 90% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. The fact that you have 800 dummies on your side only proves that education is no guarantee of intelligence.

5. How can you trust the Bible when it has been changed and corrupted so much through the centuries?
I aimed to show everyone that Christianity was nonsense. I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. In fact, I discovered that the Bible is far and away the most meticulously preserved and widely attested document of the ancient world. No other book even comes close (we go into greater detail on this subject in our book, “Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door”). This reliability was confirmed by the 1948 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which showed that after a thousand years of copying, the text as it appears in modern Bibles was more than ninety-five percent the same, word-for-word and letter-for-letter, as it had been three thousand years earlier! And what differences did exist were mainly spelling variations.

The relative consistency of nonsense is of little interest to us. The fact remains that the Bible is little more than a book of fairy-tales. The ancient stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu have survived the ravages of time, and yet we do not believe that the ancient stories of Sumer are anything but poetic allegory. As a Christian, you’re far more likely to be asked “How can you trust the Bible to guide your morality when it advocates rape, incest, genocide, infanticide and cruelty?”. I’d try and work on the response for that one instead.

6. Hasn’t modern science pretty much disproved the Bible?
It’s hard to imagine anything that is farther from the truth than the idea that modern science has disproved the Bible. In fact, the science of archaeology, to name one field, has repeatedly confirmed the trustworthiness of the biblical accounts (we devote a chapter to this subject in our book, “Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door”). Archaeologist William F. Albright wrote,

The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history

We don’t need 18th century skepticism to tell us the Bible is full of holes. Where do we begin? The creation story perhaps, or Noah’s Flood? Shall we discuss what science has to say about the possibility of Jonah living inside a giant fish for three days, or Samson killing thousands of men with a donkey’s jaw-bone? As for the Bible’s take on history, modern archaeology has found little in the way of proof. Take the “City of David“. While Israeli archaeologists acknowledge that there is no evidence linking David to the site, they anticipate eventually finding this proof, and as far as they are concerned, there is no way to convince them otherwise. Proof has remained elusive for Israel’s archaeologists, but it hasn’t prevented anyone there from trying to use it as a political tool to bolster Israel’s claim to ancient Palestine. Does this sound like good science to you?

7. Who even knows if Jesus ever really existed?

The existence of a man named Jesus who lived in Galilee and Judea in the early part of the first century is utterly indisputable from a historical standpoint. In fact, if you ever encounter such a view from a friend or teacher, invite that person to travel with you to Israel. In the land where Jesus once lived, everyone—Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists—consider the idea he that never existed to be laughable. Why? Because the evidence of his historicity is a daily reality there.

Is this guy for real? I don’t find the idea laughable at all, and I’m not the only one. Some of the very first Christians, the Gnostics, didn’t believe in a historical Jesus either. You don’t hear much about these early Christians since, like the Arians, they were mostly wiped out. Questioning the historicity of Jesus isn’t new; we just weren’t allowed to voice contrary opinions for a long time. To claim that everyone agrees on his historical existence is a pretty big disservice to Christian teens desperately trying to defend their bullshit, trust me.

8. Don’t you think Jesus could have been just a good teacher who didn’t intend to be worshiped as a god?

Though Christianity and Christians can be pretty unpopular these days, Jesus remains widely admired… even by many people who don’t profess to believe in him or worship him. He is revered as a “good teacher,” as a “philosopher,” but not as who he said he was, according to the historical record. C. S. Lewis famously wrote about this phenomenon:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse…let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Creating this kind of dichotomy can’t possibly work in your favor, guys. Any person with a logical mind not indoctrinated to your cult would immediately realize that, if given the choice between God or madman, Jesus certainly fits the description of the latter. When he curses a fig tree for failing to give him fruit, the choice seems fairly obvious. When he claims that diseases are the result of demonic possession, we recognize the words of a loon. Giving him the status of godhood only serves to prove how little Jesus knew about the real world. If he did exist, he is no more remarkable than Apollonius of Tyana, who was claimed to have performed the exact same miracles as Jesus (with the added bonus of being able to pass through walls like David Copperfield).

9. Do you really believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead?
Many theories have been put forth to try to cast doubt on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. All of  them are inadequate; some are even ludicrous (we devote three chapters to these theories in our book, “Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door”). In fact, the historical evidence for the resurrection is so overwhelming, historians have to become “anti-historical” in their efforts to build a case against it. As Lord Darling, a prominent English judge, once said, “No intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.

Lord Darling, for any of you who gives a shit, was a minor historical figure of little importance, and little relevancy. Authority here, in any case, is not needed to contest the Resurrection of a Palestinian Jew 2000 years ago. Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, and what little there is consist of “witness” accounts written decades after his supposed death by people who never even met the guy. If our standards for evidence are so low, than should we also believe that Perseus really did kill the Medusa, and Orpheus braved the underworld to rescue his beloved?

10. How can you believe in that stuff?

The most convincing evidence for the Christian faith is not historical, textual, or archaeological; it is the testimony of a changed life. When I (Josh) set out to disprove the Christian faith, my mind met unassailable facts… but my heart met irresistible love. I met a group of Christians at Kellogg College in Battle Creek, Michigan, who exposed me for the first time to the love of God. Oh, how they loved each other. And I wanted what they had. That love paved the road of faith for me, and thus began my journey of faith. All the evidence in the world—the most powerful arguments and most convincing proofs—probably wouldn’t have gotten through to me if the transforming power of God’s love had not reached my heart through that student group and others.

Always keep in mind that the same will be true of anyone who challenges or questions your faith. Your answers can help open their hearts, but the vibrant evidence of a changed life will always be the most convincing apologetic you can offer.

This is usually where arguments with Christians end: this idea that “a changed life” is somehow proof that their faith is real. While I don’t deny that their beliefs may be genuine, it has no bearing on reality whatsoever. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second regardless of how I feel about it, or whether my life is transformed with such information. If relying on emotion is your idea of a strong defense in face of legitimate criticism, than there’s very little I can do to convince you otherwise. Of course, I can offer you this little piece of advice: don’t expect to blow anyone away with these kinds of pathetic arguments, boys and girls.

A few weeks ago I posted a video of a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. The video made it clear that Craig is no dummy, despite believing in absurdities. He’s been particularly busy recently defending the faith, and one of his latest articles tries to justify the genocide and infanticide in the Bible. It’s pretty messed up, actually:

According to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), when God called forth his people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land of their forefathers, he directed them to kill all the Canaanite clans who were living in the land (Deut. 7.1-2; 20.16-18). The destruction was to be complete: every man, woman, and child was to be killed.

The command to kill all the Canaanite peoples is jarring precisely because it seems so at odds with the portrait of Yahweh, Israel’s God, which is painted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Contrary to the vituperative rhetoric of someone like Richard Dawkins, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of justice, long-suffering, and compassion.

We’ve obviously read a different book. God doesn’t strike me for one second as having any kind of compassion at all. He kills people for burning incense improperly. He commands his “people” to kill all the other tribes who happen to live around them. This whole “God is love” shit is a pretty recent phenomenon. Just ask Pope Innocent III.

According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are.

In other words, if the commands of an all loving God sound evil, it’s only because good and evil are not really concepts he has to worry about, since he’s not subject to his own moral laws. In other words, if God does something we consider evil, like command the Jews to slaughter innocent people, it only seems that way to us because we’re subject to moral laws, not God.

So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their own initiative, it would have been wrong.

Wow. So if I kill my neighbor, I’m committing an evil act. However if a voice in my head told me to do so, it’s kosher. Good to know!

God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.

Yeah, clearly little children who remember nothing of their parents equally stupid religious beliefs would have been a major threat. Better that they should all be smashed against rocks, right?

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.

See, that’s the kind of ignorant shit that drives us crazy. You’re literally suggesting they were in fact saved by being brutally murdered. That’s just fucking ignorant.

The slander doesn’t seem to want to go away. If we aren’t being accused of dogmatically disbelieving, then we’re being mean or belligerent, and every other imaginable insult, all because we don’t share the notion a magical sky-man made the world. Now it looks as though organizations that were traditionally on our side have started taking potshots at us. Check out this article written by Dr. John Shook, who is the Director of Education and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry. He claims many atheists are ignorant of religions and should do more study before berating them (this, by the way, is his strategy for selling his new book).

I’ll ignore for a moment the fact I see no reason why anyone should be an expert in nonsense in order to disbelieve (the burden of proof is on believers, not atheists). It seems that Dr. Shook is unaware atheists on average seem to know just as much, if not more about religion than believers do. How about this little survey from the New York Times? Atheists scored the highest of all the demographics. Is that not at least a partial clue perhaps we aren’t all as ignorant as Shook thinks?

The “know-nothing” wing of the so-called New Atheism really lives up to that label. Nonbelievers reveling in their ignorance are an embarrassing betrayal of the free-thought legacy.

A large portion of atheists I’ve met over the years had formerly been believers, and committed ones at that. They poured over the Bible hoping to find something compelling that could solidify their shaky belief, to no avail. The accusation we’re ignorant of fantasy is a slap to the face of every earnest atheist who came to their disbelief through study, careful thought, and intellectual integrity. Sure, there are plenty of loud, ignorant people who refuse to acknowledge the intellectual traditions of religion, but so what? If there was a “Higher Criticism” of the Santa Claus myth, would you need to be an expert theologian to argue the story is mere fantasy?

I have to imagine the confusion is caused by the mistaken idea religion has anything to contribute to the conversation about our existence and our place in the Universe. They’ve been making the claim for so long it’s considered “normal” to believe in God. They have it easy: they can make an infinite amount of baseless claims, and we’re seen as the bad guys for calling them on their bullshit. So when a group of individuals reject these claims as being entirely without merit, we’re the ones painted as dogmatic and close minded. “Science hasn’t yet found all the answers, and my God lives in the margins!”

How many pointless articles are going to be written about how “New Atheism” is dogmatic? I feel like the same old tired arguments are always being carelessly tossed around. “How can atheists claim with certainty there is no God? It’s more intellectually congruous to be an agnostic!”. Have any of these people actually bothered to think about what they’re saying before they say it?

It’s not just dumb religious people chiming in their two cents, accusing us non-believers of being dogmatic. Smart people can also be profoundly confused as to the nature of disbelief. Take this article written by David Eagleman. He seems to think we’re being intellectually disingenuous, and he feels being a “possibilian” (possibly the dumbest new word I’ve heard all year) is the better position. But I have to wonder what’s to be done with the millions of people who simply don’t find the argument for God compelling? Are they dogmatic for having never been convinced something supernatural created the natural world? Should we all sit them down and berate them for being dogmatic?

So it seems we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion. Given this, I am often surprised by the number of people who seem to possess total certainty about their position.

How many times do we have to clarify our position the absence of evidence for God is our only real conviction? If there was suddenly compelling evidence to suggest “He” was real (I still giggle at religionists giving their God a sex), do you think the majority of atheists would continue to be disbelievers? It demonstrates only a profound ignorance of the concept of atheism. We are all, to some degree, agnostics, and open to evidence about the supernatural. We’re just fucking sick and tired of people telling us atheists are the ones in the wrong. Last time I checked, the most “compelling” evidence for God was we hadn’t found him yet. Wow, I’m totally convinced now! I’ll have to sell all my atheist related books and get on this whole “possibilian” bandwagon! Yeah, I’ll get right on that…