Category Archives: Atheism

Irrationality in the Bible

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Superstition

The Bible claims that random decision generators like dice are controlled by God and should be treated as infallible. That’s how the Bible encourages people to answer important questions, like whether someone is guilty of breaking the law. That or perform other silly rituals, like making people drink dirty water, and wishing for the water to harm them, but only if they’re guilty.

Another Bible-approved way to answer hard questions is to ask priests or prophets. (Or you can follow Paul’s example and just assume your own dreams are telling you about something real.) The priests are to be treated as infallible and always unquestioningly obeyed. And anyone who thinks the priests might not be so perfect is to be killed.

The Bible makes fun of superstitious people consulting fortune-tellers and divination instruments… and then advises them to consult these other fortune-tellers and divination instruments instead. It also makes fun of people praying to worthless pagan gods instead of the Bible-approved God. But I think you’ll find you get pretty much the same results no matter which entity you try asking for help or answers.

The Bible claims that seeking God is all you have to do to fully understand what’s right. It tells both kings and commoners to obsessively follow all its terrible rules, and indoctrinate their children with them. And it’s portrayed as a good thing when a foreign king decides to kill or otherwise punish his subjects if they don’t obey the biblical laws.

The Bible claims that curses are only effective when they’re deserved. This is the kind of thing that leads people to falsely think unfortunate people must be getting what they deserve. It discourages people from trying to either identify or fix the real cause of the problem.

The Bible blames mental health problems on “evil spirits“. And it commands sick people to seek help from religious authorities, rather than doctors. Jesus does say the sick need a doctor, but that’s just a metaphorical way of referring to himself. The Bible portrays the care of actual doctors as useless and the wrong choice, claiming that human help is worthless. It threatens people with curses and destruction if they rely on anyone but God for help. But in reality, it’s religious healings that are useless and the wrong choice.

Anti-intellectualism

The God of the Bible seems to hate it when humans are smart. When he created humans, the first thing he told them they must not do was to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, which would give them wisdom. God thinks wisdom and knowledge are useless. When he sees intelligent people, he kills them or turns them into fools, because he likes them better that way.

God also seems to hate seeing humans make any technological progress. When he saw that people were developing better construction techniques so they could make an unprecedentedly tall building, God wasn’t happy with them. He didn’t want people working together and figuring out ways to do amazing new things. So he put a stop to that project by restricting their ability to communicate.

Then when God had people build things for him later on, he wouldn’t let them use any tools. He threatens to punish people just for using fire to help them see. He’d rather they blindly trust him as they walk in the dark.

Paul made a point of intentionally becoming foolish and ignorant when he preached. He demonized philosophy and taught his followers that it was futile to try to be wise or knowledgeable. Even Solomon claimed that investigating deep questions is somehow not honorable, that you shouldn’t rely on your own understanding, and that gaining wisdom and knowledge is pointless and only brings sorrow1 and death. Why do these people hate wisdom and thinking so much? Probably because they realize that that kind of thing can lead people to see how wrong the Bible is.

The Bible says you should respond to foolishness with similar foolishness. Why? Because otherwise, the fool will think he’s wise. But that would only be a bad thing because he currently isn’t in fact wise. Thinking you’re wise isn’t inherently a bad thing, as the Bible claims it is. That would mean people would need to be either foolish or wrong, and people should be neither of those things. So how about educating the fool and feeding him wisdom instead of more foolishness? If you help him become wise, then he’ll be right to think he’s wise. But if you live by the Bible, you’re not allowed to even point out foolishness.

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How to tell if someone really believes in Jesus

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If someone claims to believe in Jesus, ask them if they ever get hungry or thirsty. If they answer yes, that means they don’t actually believe in Jesus. If they answer no, you still need a little more evidence before you can conclude that they’re a believer.

Ask the alleged Christian if they obey everything Jesus commanded. Do they always give people whatever they ask for?2 Have they sold everything they owned and given the money away to the poor? Do they hate their families? Do they let criminals mistreat them as much as they want without resisting? Do they mutilate their bodies every time they do something wrong? Have they demonstrated their love for their friends by killing themselves? Anyone who claims to know Jesus but doesn’t do what he commands is a liar.

Next, ask them to show you some miracles like Jesus did. Jesus says everyone who believes in him can do all the same things he did, and more! So have them start off with some of the miracles that Jesus did, like mind reading, turning water into wine, turning a little food into a lot of food, walking on water, flying, disappearing, controlling the weather, curing every disease, and raising the dead.

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The top 40 best atheist songs

Atheism

In this post, I’ll be listing the 40 atheist songs that I’ve judged to be the best, based on several factors including cleverness and relevance to the topic.

When I first started searching for atheist music, I found that a lot of the lists people have made were full of songs that really had little to nothing to do with atheism, which made it hard to find actual atheist songs. A song isn’t an atheist song just because it’s about science. A song isn’t necessarily an atheist song even if it mentions atheism or has a vaguely anti-religious sounding title.

In my list, I am only including songs that actually have lyrics that (favorably) discuss atheism (or closely related topics such as criticism of religion, arguments for and against the existence of God, and rejection of supernatural beliefs). I may occasionally include a song that isn’t exactly an atheist song if it’s close enough to being one, and it’s good enough in other ways to make up for the slight lack of relevance. But the further a song is from really being an atheist song, the less likely it is to make it onto this list.

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Faith is not reasonable

Atheism, Flawed concepts, The bad book, , , , , ,

Faith is commonly regarded as a virtue. But is it really a good thing? What exactly is faith, anyway? Let’s look as some definitions.

Faith: Complete trust or confidence in something. Believing something without question. Firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Faith can also mean an obligation of loyalty, and if we’re still talking about beliefs, that would mean being devoted to sticking to a particular belief (which goes along with believing something firmly and without question).

“Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.” —Bill Maher

So then, faith means you decide to believe a particular idea even though there’s no evidence for it, and then you completely refuse to ever question it or consider changing your mind about it, disregarding all evidence to the contrary. Faith means being gullible regarding some ideas, and closed-minded to others. Faith means abandoning reason, willfully ignoring the evidence, breaking the connection between your beliefs and reality.

“There is no virtue in accepting something on faith, since it may very well be false, and it is clearly not virtuous to believe the false.” —Charlotte Schnook

Clearly this is an unbelievably bad way to form your beliefs. Considering what faith actually is, I don’t see how anyone could possibly think it was a good thing. There’s absolutely nothing good or reasonable about it. Having faith is just like having a delusion, except you’re doing it on purpose. If you want to have true beliefs and avoid having false beliefs, having faith is probably the most counterproductive thing you could possibly do.

Unlike reason and evidence, faith provides no way to determine which things you should believe. Any belief can be “justified” by faith just as well as any other. If you have faith in one religion, why not have faith in another religion? Why not believe that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan? Why not accept on faith that you should give me all your money right now?

You can probably think of some reasons not to accept those things, but why do you suddenly think you need to have reasons for what you believe? If I tell you that Ahura Mazda is the real God, or that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan, or that you need to give me all your money, why do you question it? You don’t need a reason to believe; you just need to have faith, right?

“If something can be used as a justification for everything, then it shouldn’t be used as a justification for anything.” —Matt Dillahunty

When the inherent irrationality of faith is pointed out, religious people will sometimes protest that their faith is based on evidence. Well, if you’re trying to base your beliefs on reason and evidence, that’s great. You’re more reasonable than some religious people. But letting evidence shape your beliefs is not what faith is, and it’s not what the Bible tells you to do. The unreasonable way of thinking I described above is exactly the kind of thinking that the Bible encourages, and describes as faith.

The Bible on faith

The Bible says faith means confidently believing in something you hope is true, but that you don’t actually see any evidence for. To live by faith is to live blindly.

Continue reading Faith is not reasonable →
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