1 Kings describes an object in Solomon’s temple, called a “Sea”. It says the Sea held 2000 baths.
Continue reading How much did the Sea hold?Yearly Archives: 2025
The Bible is badly written
Some people think the Bible is a “good book”, the work of a perfect God. If you actually read the Bible, you’ll find that this book is not actually good in any way. It’s a very poorly written book full of stupid nonsense, false claims, and terrible advice. This post is about how bad the writing in the Bible is.
The Bible repeats itself way too much. It’s full of random non sequiturs. It does a terrible job when it attempts to quote itself, and when it tries to make analogies. And it constantly contradicts itself.
The Bible says Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of everyone. But Adam wouldn’t have known anything about reproduction at that time, so that’s not a realistic thought process for him to have. He wouldn’t have known what a mother was, because mothers didn’t exist yet.
The Bible seems to indicate that God first gave humans permission to eat meat just after the flood. But two chapters before that, God gives Noah instructions about how many “clean” and “unclean” animals to take on the ark. How could God expect Noah to distinguish between those, if he hadn’t even given people permission to eat meat at all yet, much less told anyone which animals he considered “clean” or “unclean”?
The book of Job has God ask who did some things, where the answer is obviously supposed to be God. What’s the point of asking and giving away the answer at the same time? Maybe there would be a point to these questions if Job had ever said anything unreasonably arrogant, but he hadn’t.
Then it has God state that Job’s friends have not spoken the truth about God, unlike Job. Does the author not realize that he’s having God call himself cruel and unjust? Job is the one who spent almost the whole story talking about how cruel and unjust God was, while his friends did nothing but try to defend God. And now God confirms that Job was right.
Genesis says “Shechem had done an outrageous thing in Israel“. Looks like the author forgot that this story was set in a time before a place called Israel existed. Later, it says “the sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies” in the city of Shechem. I guess that means the sons other than the ones who had left the dead bodies there?
Joseph says he was “forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews“. Did such a thing even exist in Joseph’s time? He had been carried off from the land of Canaan, which (according to the Bible) did not yet belong to the Hebrews.
It’s unclear what Joseph is trying to do when he tells his brothers to tell the Pharaoh, who apparently hates shepherds, that Joseph’s family tends livestock. Some translations have him tell his brothers to tell Pharaoh that they tend cattle, which implies that Joseph is continuing to take after his father and trying to deceive Pharaoh. But it still wouldn’t make any sense, because even in those versions, Joseph tells Pharaoh that they’re shepherds. If he’s trying to hide the fact that they’re shepherds, he’s doing a very bad job.
It says God avoided harming the Israelites during half of the Ten Plagues, but it doesn’t say so during the plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, boils, or locusts. It also never says the blood or the darkness went back to normal. Either God was being sloppy and forgetful here, or the author is.
While the Israelites were still slaves in Egypt, God told them they should celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread on that day because that was the day he had brought them out of Egypt. No, God, that hadn’t happened yet. Later, he told Aaron to put some manna with the tablets of the covenant law, which didn’t exist yet.
Leviticus 2 starts out like it’s going to tell what to do “when anyone sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands“. It then tells what to do in several more specific scenarios, but doesn’t get around to telling what to do when an ordinary individual sins until 25 verses later.
God makes it sound like a unique attibute of unclean kinds of animals is that touching their carcasses makes you unclean. But then he says the same is true of the “clean” animals. So why didn’t he just say that all animal carcasses make you unclean? There was no reason to bring up the distinction between clean and unclean kinds of animals here.
Most of Numbers 2 is written like God is giving instructions, but the quotation of God ends in verse 2.
The verse that starts with “This is how the lampstand was made:” doesn’t tell us anywhere near as much about that as you would expect from a description that starts that way.
Moses starts a sentence with “When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you”, but then he tells them what will happen at a later time, instead of telling them what will happen when they are in distress and all these things have happened to them.
He starts another sentence with “As you know,” before telling his people a bunch of geographical details about the promised land. Why would they know all that? They’ve never been there. And if they really do know, why is he telling them?
Deuteronomy 12 is a rambling mess, giving rules about eating meat that sound like maybe they’re actually trying to give rules about sacrifices, but not actually saying anything about sacrifices when giving those rules, which makes the rules sound pointlessly obvious, though if the rules really were about sacrifices, they would contradict the other rules in this chapter that actually do mention sacrifices.
Moses lists the animals that Israelites are allowed to eat. All ten of them. Then he says they can eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud. Surely that includes more than just the ten he listed? So what was the point of listing those specific ones?
Then, “of those that chew the cud or that have a divided hoof”, he lists a few specific animals that they’re not allowed to eat. But he implies that any animal that doesn’t have both of those properties is forbidden, so there was no need to list specific animals. It was also pointless for him to say “or that have a divided hoof” in that sentence, since none of the animals he listed in that sentence had those.
Moses tells the people what to do “if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done”, when no detestable thing has been specified.
He says if a guilty person “deserves to be beaten”, then the judge should have that person flogged “with the number of lashes the crime deserves“. That’s awfully vague. This seems like the kind of thing you would want to have more specific laws about. Moses seems to think that this is important enough to make a law about, but not that it’s important enough that the law needs to specify exactly when someone deserves to be beaten, and how much.
When Moses is done giving Israel the laws that he already gave them, he states that he’s now 120 years old and no longer able to lead them. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was saying he was no longer able because he was old. But that can’t be it, because the Bible says he was not weak when he died. So what was he trying to say, then?
Then Moses sings a song where he states that when God divided mankind into nations, he set up boundaries according to how many sons Israel had. That doesn’t make much sense chronologically, since nations already existed before Jacob was even born. And what does the number of sons of Israel have to do with assigning land to all the other nations, anyway?
And then Moses gives a blessing to each of the tribes of Israel. For most of the tribes, the narration includes an introductory line stating that this is what he said about that tribe. But it fails to give the tribes of Reuben, Ephraim, Mannasseh, and Issachar their own introductory lines.
Later, it says “Joshua took the entire land” and gave it to the tribes of Israel. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was saying that Joshua had taken all of the promised land. But that can’t be it, because Joshua never did take all of the promised land. A lot of it was still unconquered when Joshua died. So what was that supposed to mean, then??
In the middle of telling what land Joshua gave the Levites, the Bible states that Arba was the forefather of Anak. Other than that, it doesn’t say who Arba and Anak are, or why we need to know about them. They don’t seem to have anything to do with what it was saying. Except that it had mentioned a place that had Arba in its name. But it doesn’t say how that place is related to Arba, whoever that is.
Then Joshua lets the Israelites know that God is going to bring on them all the evil things he has threatened, until he has destroyed them from the land. Was that statement meant to be conditional on what Israel was going to do? If so, Joshua forgot to say that part. And if not, what was the point of telling them that, if they can’t do anything about it?
The book of Judges tells about a time when the Israelites “turned from the ways of their ancestors, who had been obedient to the Lord’s commands.” It should have said some of their ancestors. Not all of their ancestors had been obedient.
It says Samson’s enemies were lying in wait for him all night at the city gate. And that his solution was to break off the city gate in the middle of the night and carry it away. How is that supposed to in any way help him get past his enemies?
In the story of Ruth, Naomi’s sons (who both die young) happen to have names that mean “sickness” and “wasting”. Not very realistic.
A story in 1 Samuel tells how big both the army of Israel and the army of Judah were, and a story in 2 Samuel has David count the fighting men of Israel and the fighting men of Judah separately. Looks like the author forgot that at the time of these stories, Judah was supposed to have been part of Israel. The author also forgets that Jerusalem didn’t belong to Israel yet, and has David go there after killing Goliath, like he’s coming home or something.
In 1 Samuel 20, Jonathan needs to inform David of something that he just found out, even though they both already knew it. So he conveys that information to David using an elaborate secret code, as if he’s unable to talk to him in person for some reason. Then he talks to him in person.
It says hundreds of people flocked to the fugitive David so he could be their leader. It doesn’t say why. It doesn’t say if he had ever done anything to make them want to do that.
In a psalm that David is supposed to have written while Saul was king, it says God has made David “the head of nations“. David was not the head of any nation at that time.
The author of 1 Samuel has a Philistine call David “as pleasing in my eyes as an angel of God“. Why would a Philistine talk like that? This author is not doing a very good job of writing a character who doesn’t believe in the God of Israel.
When David tries to get Uriah out of the war, to go home to his wife, Uriah objects that Israel “and Judah” (which is still not a separate entity, by the way) still have to camp out in tents because of the ongoing war. So, Uriah asks, how could he go home to eat and drink and make love to his wife at a time like this?
Well, when he asks this, Uriah is already eating and drinking at the palace. So the eating and drinking part clearly isn’t a problem for him. It seems the only thing that Uriah really objects to is specifically the prospect of having sex with his beautiful wife. Which doesn’t make much sense, except for the narrative purposes of implying to the reader why David had wanted Uriah to go home in the first place,1 and providing a reason for David to resort to getting Uriah killed.
A prophet gives David a message pointing out that God has given David “all Israel and Judah“. The author continues to forget that Judah is supposed to have been part of Israel. (In reality they had always been two separate kingdoms, but not in the Bible’s version of history. Acting like Judah is distinct from Israel in David’s time is inconsistent.)
When Shimei accuses David of having shed blood in the household of Saul, David acts like Shimei is right, even though David doesn’t kill any relatives of Saul until later. And they act like God disapproves of David supposedly having killed Saul’s relatives, but then when he actually does it, it’s because that’s what God wants him to do.
2 Samuel 20 claims that the whole nation of Israel instantly went from supporting David to abandoning him just because one guy suggested it. But it says the men of Judah stayed loyal to him, which means that what it just said is false. “All the men of Israel” didn’t desert him.
2 Samuel 23 reports what David’s last words were, which is out of place. David doesn’t die till three chapters later. Before he dies, David says he expects Solomon to know what to do, because Solomon is “a man of wisdom“. Looks like the author forgot that Solomon wasn’t supposed to have been wise yet. He doesn’t become wise until the next chapter, after David dies.
When it’s telling about Solomon’s reign, 1 Kings continues to talk about “Judah and Israel“. According to the pseudohistory of the Bible, that’s like saying “California and the United States”.
The Bible’s description of Elisha returning a miraculously resurrected boy to his mother is ridiculously boring and mechanical.
It has the other prophets call Elisha “man of God“, a phrase which in the Bible means a prophet. The prophets are all “men of God”, so why would they call him that? Wouldn’t they call him something more specific, to distinguish him from the rest of the men of God?
The Bible says some time after Elisha died, some people threw another body into Elisha’s tomb because they were in a hurry. It doesn’t explain why his tomb was open.
The story of Esther has the king of Persia state that “no document written in the king’s name and sealed with his ring can be revoked“, while doing just that.
Isaiah takes almost 50 words to say “this is what the Lord says” before getting around to actually saying what the Lord says. And it wasn’t even necessary for him to say that he was going to say what the Lord says at all, since he had already been saying what the Lord says.
God tells Jeremiah he’s going to send four kinds of destroyers, which he names and tries to say what each of them is going to do. But instead of naming any specific ways of destroying, all but one of the things he says they’re going to do are pretty much the same thing, which is killing/destroying. There was no need to say that the destroyers were going to do that. And the other thing he says one of them is going to do doesn’t seem to involve destroying at all, so why is he calling it a destroyer? Or if it does involve destroying, why didn’t he mention that?
When some people are trying to get the prophet Jeremiah executed for predicting disaster, some other people argue that that would just make God angry, and that in a previous case, listening to a prophet who predicted disaster had had good results. After that, a story about yet another prophet is inserted parenthetically in the middle of that story about Jeremiah.
In this story, a prophet who is saying the same thing as Jeremiah does get executed for predicting disaster, and it doesn’t say anything bad happened as a result. So inserting that story into Jeremiah’s story was not only pointless, but kind of undermines the point they were trying to make.
Jeremiah tells the people that God says the people have done what they said they would do. But when they said they would do it, that was part of this same conversation. It doesn’t seem like enough time has passed since they said that just now, for them to have had time to do it. Hosea 6 and Haggai 1 both end in the middle
of a sentence for some reason. In Micah 2, God tries to convince his people that he’ll bring them back to their land, when they’re still not even convinced that they’re going to have to leave their land.
Zechariah sees four chariots, and asks an angel about them. The angel tries to explain what they are and where each chariot is going, but forgets one of them.
The author of the gospel of Luke implies that the Roman census required everyone to travel to wherever their distant ancestors lived, which makes no sense. “Luke” must have made up this part just so that he could claim that Jesus was born where a prophecy said the Messiah was supposed to be born.
The author of the gospel of Matthew has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on two donkeys, because he misinterpreted the prophecy that he was basing his story on.
Jesus complains about something that the teachers of the law and Pharisees do, and something that they don’t do. Then he says they “should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former“. If he wants them to do the former, then why did he complain about them doing it?? What was the point of mentioning it at all?
Matthew inserts the command “Let the reader understand” in the middle of a sentence as if that was part of something Jesus said. Which doesn’t actually help the reader understand anything.
In the parable of the lost son, Jesus says the lost son ended up desperately in need, because of his own irresponsible actions… and also because there was a severe famine affecting the whole country. Adding a famine to the story was completely unnecessary, and weakens the point that the story was trying to make. And then Jesus forgets about the famine, and has everyone have a big feast as soon as the son gets back home.
Mark says the disciples were astonished, and others following Jesus were afraid. It doesn’t say what they were astonished by or what they were afraid of.
Matthew has the Jews declare that the responsibility for the blood of Jesus will be on their children. That seems rather unlikely to have happened. Why would they say that? Doesn’t make any sense.
Jesus was put to death for allegedly claiming to be the king of the Jews, which was apparently considered treason against the Roman emperor. But then how did all the people who actually did call Jesus the king of the Jews get away with it? The Magi, Nathanael, all the people who greeted Jesus when he came to Jerusalem, Pilate, and all the Christians should have been crucified too.
That’s assuming it really was treason to claim that the Jews had a king. But I don’t see why it would be. Can’t a king exist under an emperor without undermining the emperor’s authority? Didn’t the Roman empire already have various kings who were subordinate to the emperor? Like the Herods. Should all those kings have been crucified too?
The Bible says Pharisees, unlike Sadducees, believe in spirits and angels and resurrections. And then it says some Pharisees said Paul should be declared innocent because “What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” They said that, not because that was a coherent reason for them to conclude that Paul was innocent, but just because they’re the kind of people who believe in spirits and angels. Sounds like bad fiction writing to me.
In Romans, Paul says “this” will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets. What will? You mean the thing you were talking about three verses ago?
Hebrews 11 tries to promote faith by telling about some Old Testament people who had faith. Then it admits that “all these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised.” Why is the author conceding that, and thereby undermining the whole point of this chapter, when it’s not even true? Half the people this chapter mentions weren’t promised anything to begin with. And the other half kinda did get what they were promised.
Revelation has someone claim that Babylon had boasted that she was not a widow and would never mourn. That does not sound like something that anyone would realistically boast about. The only reason it says she said that is to set Babylon up to be immediately proved wrong by God.
Revelation predicts that Satan will recruit vast numbers of people from multiple nations, and gather them for battle, and they’ll march up and surround Jerusalem… And then God will kill them all with fire from heaven. Well, that was over awfully fast.
Continue reading The Bible is badly writtenHow many foremen supervised the building of the temple?
In 1 Kings, it says Solomon had 3300 foremen supervising the construction of the temple. Later in 1 Kings, it says there were only 550 officials supervising the workers for Solomon’s projects.
Continue reading How many foremen supervised the building of the temple?
The Story of the Martyrdom of Stephen—
The Speech of a Fool
Jesus had told his disciples that whenever they got arrested, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit would be there to tell them the right thing to say. He said God would make them sound so wise that no one would be able to argue with them. But when the Spirit tried to help them decide what to say, it mostly just made them groan and babble incoherently. This made people think the Christians were out of their minds.
Continue reading The Story of the Martyrdom of Stephen—The Speech of a Fool
Should people support their parents?
Yes.
Jesus criticized the Pharisees for encouraging people to give money to God instead of using it to help their parents. So according to Jesus, giving to your parents is more important than giving to God.
Paul agreed, at least in the case of widows: He said if you’re a Christian with a widowed mother, you should take care of her yourself, so she won’t be a needless burden on the rest of the church.
No.
Continue reading Should people support their parents?Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheism
Agnosticism
What is agnosticism? There are two different things that are called agnosticism, known as strong and weak agnosticism, or positive and negative agnosticism, or hard and soft agnosticism. (All of these alternate terms, “weak”/”negative”/”soft”, seem rather connotationally unfortunate. But I figure “soft” is the least so, so that’s the one I’m gonna choose to use.)
Hard agnosticism
Hard agnosticism is the belief that it’s impossible to know whether there is a God or not. So is hard agnosticism about knowledge, as opposed to mere belief? Sort of, though it is still defined in terms of a mere belief: Whether you’re a hard agnostic is not determined by whether you have a certain piece of knowledge, but by whether you have a certain belief about knowledge.
No position regarding the existence of God, not even hard agnosticism, can be defined as knowing (or not knowing) that some particular answer to the God question is true. That’s because one of the requirements for a belief to count as knowledge is that the belief is true.
So if, say, theism was defined as knowing that there is a God, you wouldn’t be able to talk about theism without implying that you agree with it. Nor would you be able to talk about atheism without implying that you agree with that. So these things need to be defined as believing (or not believing) something. Theism, atheism, and agnosticism are about what you believe or don’t believe, not about what you know or don’t know. Even hard agnosticism is just a belief about what we don’t know.
People might sometimes describe their beliefs as “knowing”, even if they don’t really mean to assert anything stronger than belief. That’s to be expected, because if you believe something is true, then you probably also believe that your belief has all the other requirements to count as knowledge. So that’s how you might talk about what you think, but that doesn’t mean that these things are actually about knowledge as opposed to belief. Not even agnosticism, and certainly not soft agnosticism.
Soft agnosticism
What is soft agnosticism? When I look at online resources that define agnosticism, they mostly seem to focus primarily on hard agnosticism. But they also (usually rather vaguely) define the soft kind as well. And their descriptions of soft agnosticism do seem compatible with it being about belief, and not actually being about a question of knowledge distinct from the question of belief.
A soft agnostic’s answer to the question of whether there is a God is “I don’t know”. But are people really talking about knowledge as opposed to mere belief when they say that? I don’t think they are.
Answering a question with “I don’t know” would normally most likely mean something like “I don’t know which answer I should give to that question”, or “I don’t know what to believe”. I would not expect someone who gave that answer to mean something like “Whatever I might believe about that, my belief is not properly justified and does not count as knowledge”.
Because as I said before, if you believe something, that generally comes with believing that your belief has all the requirements for it to be knowledge. So it would be pretty strange to believe something, but not to consider it to be something that you know.
Unless you’re saying you have faith, but if you had faith, you wouldn’t be an agnostic, would you? Or is everyone who has faith in God an agnostic, because they merely believe but don’t know that God exists (since their belief lacks the kind of justification that would be required for a belief to be knowledge)? No, they’re not. Or at least they’re not soft agnostics, because that’s not what the soft agnostic’s answer “I don’t know” means.
If you ask people whether there’s a God, you’re looking to find out what they believe. You’re not asking about anything to do with knowledge as opposed to mere belief. And people you ask may answer using an expression that happens to contain the word “know”, but that doesn’t mean they’re randomly deciding to answer that question with something irrelevant about knowledge, instead of actually addressing the question of what they believe.
I think people who answer that question with “I don’t know” are not really saying anything about knowledge. All they’re intending to say is simply that they don’t have a belief either way. So a soft agnostic is someone who lacks a belief that there’s a God, and also lacks a belief that there’s no God.
In other words, they have no opinion. They’re undecided. They’re suspending judgment. This is (and should be) the default state for the relation between any person and any claim, until the person comes to have a sufficiently good reason to either accept or reject the claim.
Soft agnosticism is a middle ground between believing that there’s a God and believing that there’s no God. Not to be confused with a middle ground between believing there’s a God and not believing there’s a God. There is no middle ground between those things; you have to do one or the other. But you don’t have to either believe there’s a God or believe there’s no God. It’s possible to have neither of those beliefs, which is what soft agnosticism is.
The principle of agnosticism
So those are the two main meanings that “agnosticism” has today, but the word actually had a different meaning originally. When Thomas Huxley coined the word “Agnosticism”, he didn’t intend it to mean either of the things that people use it to mean now.
What Huxley called agnosticism was the general principle that you should not act like you’re certain about something unless you have good evidence to support your opinion. (This was in response to the principle of faith, which claims that there are things you should believe with complete certainty regardless of the evidence or lack thereof.)
Neither the hard nor the soft modern senses of the word “agnostic” really seem to have much to do with its original meaning. But if I had to pick one, I’d say the soft meaning is closer to the original intent of the word. Because soft agnosticism and the principle of agnosticism are both fairly closely related to the principle of initially suspending judgment by default (which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago). I don’t know where people got the idea that agnosticism meant that knowledge about God’s existence is impossible.
Atheism
What is atheism? There are two different things that some people consider to both be forms of atheism, known as strong and weak atheism, or positive and negative atheism, or hard and soft atheism. (Again, I’m gonna go with hard and soft.) Hard atheism is the belief that there is no God, and soft atheism is a lack of belief that there is a God.
Hard atheism was originally the only thing that the term “atheism” meant. It’s what most people understand that word to mean. It’s how dictionaries say the word is used. And it’s what most philosophers use it to mean.2 But a lot of atheists now consider the broader category that they call “soft atheism” to be a form of atheism too. Some of them even say the soft version is the correct way to define atheism. Where did they get the idea that atheism is a lack of belief? Does it make sense to define atheism this way?
Some people have been trying to redefine atheism as soft atheism since Antony Flew in the 1970s: “Whereas nowadays the usual meaning of ‘atheist’ in English is ‘someone who asserts that there is no such being as God’, I want the word to be understood not positively but negatively.” (At least he acknowledged that his definition was not the standard definition of atheism.)
Some atheist activist groups are pushing this redefinition of atheism, not because it makes more sense, but mainly for practical agenda-driven purposes like inflating their demographic numbers by including soft agnostics as atheists. Are there any good reasons to define atheism as soft atheism? Are there any good reasons not to?
The atheist website EvilBible.com argues against the idea that “soft atheists” should be called atheists at all. That website lists several mostly good reasons to reject the “lack of belief” definition of atheism, and it also gives one particularly bad reason. (Which is the one that it asserts the most vehemently.) The bad reason is that English speakers commonly use “I don’t believe X” to mean “I believe X is false”. That’s not a good reason because:
- The fact that people commonly use language in illogical ways is no reason to accept those illogical uses of language. Normally, when the majority of people think or do a certain thing, intelligent people don’t take that as indisputable proof that the thing must be right. But for some reason, some people seem to think that the popular consensus can never be wrong when it comes to language.
- The fact that some people fail to make a distinction between two different things doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction there to be made. And it doesn’t mean the distinction should not be made.
- And what are they even trying to prove with this argument? If this common usage argument was valid, what would the conclusion be? That everyone who says they “don’t believe” in God is an atheist? That’s basically the opposite of the point that EvilBible is trying to make! Their argument #6 seems to directly contradict their argument #8, or to make the same stupid error that their argument #8 calls out. Why are they arguing against their own position??
“Soft atheism” is not atheism
I think some of EvilBible’s other arguments for limiting the term “atheism” to hard atheism are pretty good, though:
- Some atheists say it doesn’t matter how most people use the word, because only atheists should get to define atheism.
- EvilBible points out that that is not how words get their meanings. The word “baby”, for instance, means what it means because that’s how we all use that word, not because babies decided that that was what it would mean.
- I’d like to also point out (though EvilBible doesn’t mention this) that this principle of exclusive self-definition can’t work, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you would know who gets to define it.
- When people argue that atheism shouldn’t be defined as only hard atheism because it should be defined by atheists, they are assuming that most atheists want it to be defined as soft atheism.
- EvilBible notes that no evidence is being provided for this idea. (EvilBible then tries to further counter it with some statistics about people who report having “no religion”. But that could mean unaffiliated theists, so those stats are irrelevant and don’t really tell us anything.)
- Anyway, like I said, you can’t solely use what atheists think as the basis for defining atheism, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you could know who to ask and who to ignore.
- Some atheists think it gives them a debating advantage if they can say they don’t have a belief or are not making a claim, and therefore have no burden of proof.3
- EvilBible responds that the people making the extraordinary claim that there is a God already have a massive burden of proof, so shifting the burden of proof onto them really isn’t necessary.
- Another response I’ve seen (not from EvilBible) is that if atheists want to be rational and to be seen as rational, they shouldn’t be trying to avoid the burden of proof just to try to make things easier on themselves.
- Especially if we’re talking about people who do actually have a belief that there’s no God. Why pretend you don’t? Trying to avoid the burden of proof just gives the impression that you’re unable to justify your position. You do have good reasons to think there’s no God, don’t you? I do. I don’t see why atheists would have a problem with having a burden of proof.
- If you really don’t have a belief that there’s no God, then you may legitimately have the debating advantage of having no burden of proof, because then your position really is the default position, which is soft agnosticism. But then why insist on calling it atheism? And why would you be debating the existence of God, and care about whether you have an “advantage”, if you don’t have an opinion on the matter?
- Etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you how a word should be used today, but for what it’s worth, the origin of the word “atheism” involved combining “atheos” with “-ism” (godless + belief), not combining “a-” with “theism” (without + belief in God).
- The EvilBible article on defining atheism concludes by extensively quoting several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias. None of them define atheism as a lack of belief. All of them basically define atheism as either the belief that there is no God, or the “disbelief” in or “denial” of the existence of God.
- And they define denial as declaring something not to be true. And they note that denying the existence of God is something agnostics don’t do,4 unlike atheists.
- The dictionaries similarly define disbelief as rejecting something as untrue, or being persuaded that an assertion is not true. One of the dictionaries contrasts unbelief (merely tentatively not accepting that something is true) with disbelief (being convinced that something is false).
- The quoted dictionaries only define disbelief this way half the time, though. And a few of them do include a definition of disbelief as “not believing”. But I’ll note that since people do often (illogically) use that to mean believing that something is false, it’s possible that those dictionary writers didn’t really mean to say that disbelief means “not believing”. Especially since one of the dictionaries that says that is the same one that repeatedly makes the point that to disbelieve something is to believe it’s false.
Here’s another problem (in addition to the ones listed on EvilBible.com) with labeling people who merely lack belief as atheists. I believe this argument was first made by atheist philosopher Graham Oppy:
If not believing that there’s a God is a form of atheism, then by the same logic, not believing that there’s no God must be a form of theism. And if you lack both beliefs (the belief in a God and the belief in no God), then it makes exactly as much sense to say you’re a soft theist as to say you’re an soft atheist.
If it’s wrong to call such a person a theist, then it’s equally wrong to call that person an atheist. Because calling yourself an atheist when you merely lack a belief that there’s a God makes as much sense as calling yourself a theist when you merely lack a belief that there’s no God. If you call “soft atheists” atheists, then you have to accept that a soft agnostic (someone who is neither a hard theist nor a hard atheist) would be both a theist and an atheist.
But you can’t be both of those things at the same time, can you? This absurd conclusion, that someone can simultaneously be both a theist and an atheist, shows that there must have been a wrong assumption somewhere, that should be rejected. And that wrong assumption is that mere lack of belief in God is atheism. It’s not. Lack of belief in God is called non-theism. And when combined with a lack of belief that there’s no God, it’s soft agnosticism.
It’s called non-theism
- Everyone is either a theist or a non-theist.
- Everyone is either an atheist or a non-atheist.
- Everyone is either an agnostic or a non-agnostic.
- All non-theists are either atheists or agnostics.
- All non-atheists are either theists or agnostics.
- All non-agnostics are either theists or atheists.
- No one is both a theist and an atheist.
- No one is both a theist and an agnostic.
- No one is both an atheist and an agnostic.
- Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-atheist is an agnostic.
- Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-agnostic is an atheist.
- Anyone who is both a non-atheist and a non-agnostic is a theist.
(By “agnostic” here, I mean a soft agnostic. Hard agnosticism is a separate variable, and it’s logically possible to combine that with soft agnosticism, theism, or atheism.)

Agnostic atheism?
Can someone be both an agnostic and an atheist? It depends on what you mean by “agnostic” and “atheist”…
Continue reading Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheismIs there anything under the earth to support it?
Job said God suspends the earth over nothing. And God confirmed that Job had spoken the truth about him. So if God is right that Job is right about this, the earth does not have anything under it supporting it. The Bible disagrees, though.
Job previously suggested that the earth is on pillars, and since he was talking about God at the time, that must have been true too. Asaph says God agrees that the earth has pillars. Samuel’s mother says God has set the earth on foundations. David and Solomon agree that the earth has foundations, and David also says the earth is floating on the sea. Other psalmists, like Asaph, agree that the earth is on foundations.
Continue reading Is there anything under the earth to support it?
The Story of Ananias and Sapphira—
The Communist Cult
The disciples of Jesus were given the ability to perform miracles better than Jesus, and they convinced thousands of people to join their new religion. The members of this original Christian church didn’t keep any personal property; they shared everything they had. Everything they earned had to be brought to their leaders to be distributed among the community according to their needs.
The goal was for everyone to be equally well off, with no one having too little or too much. Everyone was to be paid the same regardless of how much or how little work they did, just as Jesus (and his ancestor David) had taught.
Continue reading The Story of Ananias and Sapphira—The Communist Cult
Who decided Titus should go to the Corinthians?
Paul told the Corinthians that Titus was coming to them on his own initiative. So it was TItus’s idea.
Continue reading Who decided Titus should go to the Corinthians?Solomon’s girl
The “Song of Songs” is a weird love song that ambiguously seems to claim to be written by Solomon, which is the only reason this eight-chapter erotic poem made it into the Bible.
The song is full of descriptions of the appearance of someone who is apparently Solomon’s favorite of his many lovers. He says she is altogether beautiful and perfect, with no flaw. She is a rose of Sharon and a lily of the valley, and she’s also a wall. She’s like a mare among Pharaoh’s horses.
Her head crowns her like a mountain, and her hair is like a royal tapestry and a flock of goats. Her eyes are doves, her nose is like a tower, her lips are like a scarlet ribbon dripping with honey, and her teeth are like shorn sheep. Her breasts are like towers, clusters of fruit, and twin gazelle fawns. Her hands are dripping with myrrh, her waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies, her legs are like jewels, etc., etc.
For some reason, all those artists of past centuries who liked to paint biblical scenes don’t seem to have done any pictures of this girl that capture these descriptions. But with the help of GPT-4o, we can now visualize what Solomon’s loveliest girl looked like. Behold the beautiful Shulamite:
Continue reading Solomon’s girl