I used to think atheists were smart. Then I visited an atheist social media community.

People were posting all kinds of unbelieverably stupid things in there, like “Why should I have to disprove the existence of your God when you haven’t proven it in the first place?” Do these people really think that the only time something can be proven false is if it has already been proven true? Or do they not know what the word “disprove” means? Or are they just not putting any thought into what they’re saying?

Anyway, here are some things I wish my fellow atheists would stop getting wrong.

Overbroad lists of atheist songs

When I look at lists of atheist songs, I find that they are often full of songs that really have little to nothing to do with atheism. The people making these lists aren’t being very careful when they decide that something is an atheist song, and this makes it hard for me to find actual atheist music.

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. For instance, “Losing My Religion” is not an atheist song. It’s just a song that uses a phrase that happens to sound atheistic, but actually just means something like “losing my temper”.

In my own atheist music list, the songs are ranked based on a combination of few different factors, one of which is how relevant a song actually is to the topic of atheism. Songs that are not so much about atheism (or closely related topics) are less likely to appear on my list, and if they do, they will tend to be lower on the list.

“Religion is a mental illness.”

Lots of people have stopped being religious by thinking critically about their religion, learning things they hadn’t been aware of, or considering the evidence and logical arguments. Their religion wasn’t cured by some psychiatric treatment.

Can it really be a mental illness if it’s possible to reason your way out of it, or to have your mind changed just by being exposed to new evidence or information? No, I don’t think that’s consistent with any reasonable definition of mental illness or delusion.

Take any big controversy or disagreement, and the people on either side will tell you that the people on the other side have a false belief which they refuse to change when they are corrected and provided with arguments and evidence that they’re wrong. I don’t think that’s sufficient to conclude that all those ordinary people are actually delusional. To the extent that false religious beliefs are persistent, it’s because of the same cognitive flaws that affect everyone, not because they have some mental illness that you don’t have.

Labeling people as mentally ill just because they’re mistaken about something, or just because you disagree with them, is a dangerous path, and we should be very hesitant to go there. Declaring beliefs to be mental illness would imply that we should be looking for ways to change people’s beliefs with medical treatments instead of by reasoning with them, which should be a horrifying idea to any freethinker.

“Hitler was a Christian.”

Maybe, but the evidence is pretty unclear. He did sometimes claim to be a Christian. He also sometimes said he wanted to destroy Christianity. He also denied that he was against Christianity. But maybe that was just because openly opposing Christianity would cost him too many supporters. Or maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he believed in an unusual version of Christianity that he recognized should probably not really count as Christianity. Whatever he was, he does seem clearly to have been against atheism, though.

“Jesus never existed.”

The idea that Jesus never existed at all (as opposed to the idea that he really lived, but then (as with Saint Nicholas) people made up a bunch of crazy stories about him later, or even in contrast to the idea that we just don’t know if there was a real Jesus or not) is a fringe theory that most scholars do not accept. The consensus among historians is that Jesus is based on a real historical person.

Before you make such a strong claim (without even acknowledging that you are disagreeing with the majority of experts), think about whether you have good reasons for it. Do you really have compelling enough evidence to think it’s true? And even if you could prove that the gospels were made-up stories about a made-up person, rather than made-up stories about a real person, what good would that do you? The detail of whether a real but not supernatural Jesus existed or not isn’t even important.

If the whole Jesus story was completely made up, and not at all based on the life of a real person, then why did the writers give him a name and hometown¹ and other details that didn’t match the prophecies they were trying to make him fulfill? And why would they include things in the stories that make him seem suspiciously like a fake, like the part where he can’t fool the people who know him best? The most likely explanation for why these things are included in the stories would seem to be that there was a Jesus, and these facts about him were too well known to deny.

It does not make your position look very strong if you give people the impression that disproving Christianity depends on disproving the existence of Jesus. If you want to discredit Christianity, surely you can think of a better and more convincing way to do that that doesn’t rely on a fringe theory.

“Morality can be explained by evolution.”

Not exactly. Evolution may be a good explanation of how we came to have some of the inclinations we have that happen to align with morality, but evolution can’t be what defines morality, for reasons similar to some of the same reasons that God can’t be what defines morality.

Did we evolve to be inclined toward certain behaviors because those behaviors are good? Then goodness is something that exists apart from evolution, so evolution can’t fully explain it. And anyway, that’s not how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t have goals like that.

Or are good behaviors good just because that’s what we evolved to do? No, that would mean that any behavior resulting from evolution would have to be good. But that’s not true. Evolution also produces behaviors that are not morally good. Sometimes it produces behaviors so wildly opposed to morality that it would never occur to humans to do such things. Unless you want to argue that every behavior that occurs in nature is actually good, because it comes from evolution, you shouldn’t be claiming that evolution is where morality comes from.

“Historical dates should be written with the religiously neutral terms BCE and CE, not BC and AD.”

Jesus is the only reason we count years starting from around 2000 years ago. No matter which terms we use for it, we are still using a Christian calendar. So why pretend we’re not? If you’re not going to actually invent a new and improved calendar system with an objectively better starting point and convince everyone to use it, just admit that we are all using a Christian calendar. Dishonestly calling something by a different name doesn’t change what it is.

If we’re not going to insist on renaming the days of the week just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, and renaming the months of the year just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, then we don’t need to change the terms BC and AD just because we don’t believe in the god those are named after. Just use BC and AD. They’re easier to tell apart than BCE and CE.

“Galileo was punished by the anti-science Church for disagreeing with their dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.”

The Church was wrong to censor and punish Galileo for what he said, but this was not a science vs religion thing. The Church was open to new scientific discoveries, and had been for centuries, as long as there was actually strong evidence for them. But as of Galileo’s time, there was nothing particularly scientific about rejecting geocentrism.

The Church was very supportive of Galileo, until he started saying the scriptures should be reinterpreted to conform to his unproven pet hypothesis. They didn’t object to heliocentrism because it was heretical; they objected to it because there wasn’t enough evidence for it yet.²

Heliocentric models predicted that there should be parallax and Coriolis effects that nobody actually observed until decades after Galileo died. Based on the evidence available in Galileo’s time, the heliocentric model wasn’t any more reasonable a conclusion than the geocentric model. The ancient Greeks had not discovered heliocentrism long before; some of them had decided to believe in heliocentrism for wildly unscientific reasons, and happened to be right.

More recently, Copernicus had also proposed a sort of heliocentric model, but his reasons for preferring heliocentrism weren’t particularly rational either. His model didn’t explain the evidence available at the time any better than geocentrism did. And because Copernicus didn’t realize that orbits were elliptical, his model was overly complex, so Occam’s razor says the Copernican model was not to be preferred. And that flawed model is the one Galileo promoted, using arguments already known to be wrong, like saying the tides prove the Earth is moving.

Then Kepler had come up with a model (involving elliptical orbits) that would turn out to be more accurate than Copernicus’s, but there still wasn’t enough evidence available at the time to tell which model was more accurate. Anyway, Galileo completely ignored Kepler’s insight, and dogmatically refused to even consider the possibility that orbits weren’t perfect circles. Galileo’s attitude in this matter was decidedly less scientific than that of the Church.

“Religion is the root of all evil.”

Not all of it. The fact that religion can cause evil doesn’t mean that nothing else causes evil. Evil surely existed before religion was invented. There have been non-religious people who have done great evil for reasons unrelated to religion, or even sometimes because of overzealous opposition to religion.

God is made in the image of humans. If some people weren’t already (without religion) inclined to do the kinds of evil things that religion promotes, they wouldn’t have invented a God who told people to do those things. And God is not the only possible justification people can give for doing those things.

Not that justifying these evils was the purpose of inventing religions. The evils that religions promote were already widely accepted in ancient times, so there would be no need to invent a religion if you wanted those things to happen. Religion was not invented to enable oppression, nor was oppression invented as a result of religion.

Some views that most atheists would consider to be religiously-motivated evil ideas really have nothing to do with religion. There are atheists who have the exact same views, and make the exact same arguments for them.

I personally find some of the moral views that happen to be popular with atheists to be far more concerning than those of typical modern Christians.³ I think we should spend more time deeply questioning our own moral opinions, not just those of the outgroup.

Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain

The Flying Spaghetti Monster was a clever idea when someone demanded that Pastafarianism be given equal time in schools, in order to make a point about creationism being taught in schools. It’s not so clever when you’re just using it as an example of something that would be absurd to believe in, or when you’re just using it as a silly name for God, or when you’re just pretending to be religious for no reason.

I kinda get why you like to do this, but I also kinda hate it when people miss the point of a clever idea or joke, but start repeating it all the time anyway, until other people start getting tired of it, and they’re not even using it in the way that originally made it actually clever or funny.

Origins and contents of the Bible

(See also: Things the Bible doesn’t say)

“The Israelites made up the story of Lot and his daughters to make their enemies look bad.”

I doubt it. The Bible does claim that the Moabites and Ammonites had an incestuous origin, but it also says the Israelites themselves had incestuous origins. Abraham’s wife was his sister, to name just one example of incest in the history of Israel according to the Bible. Were they trying to make themselves look bad too?

“The Bible says God massacred the babies of Egypt in the last of the ten plagues.”

It says he killed the firstborn of Egypt. I know, that word makes you think of babies, because it has “born” in it. But firstborn doesn’t mean babies! Your firstborn child is your oldest child. You could be any age and be the firstborn in your family, as long as you never had any siblings older than you. Killing all the firstborn would include some babies, but it does not mean that God was specifically targeting babies.

“The Bible says Moses took 40 years to get from Egypt to the promised land for some reason, when it shouldn’t have taken anywhere near that long.”

It actually says Moses and the Israelites got there fairly quickly, but then God wouldn’t let them take over the land yet. It says the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years after they had already pretty much arrived at their destination, because God made them do that, to punish them. They didn’t wander for 40 years because they were too slow, or couldn’t find their way.

Up until that point, whenever the Bible mentions how long it’s been since they left Egypt, it’s never later than the second year, even just a few chapters before God stops them from entering the promised land. It does say they ate manna for 40 years “until they reached the border of Canaan“, which is rather ambiguous. But I think that can be reasonably interpreted as “until God let them all actually cross the border”.

It says the manna started just after they left Egypt, and it stopped once the Israelites actually settled in the promised land. That doesn’t leave any room for an additional 40 years for them to make the journey from Egypt to Canaan. So it would have to mean the 40 years of wandering after quickly getting almost there and then being turned away.

“Mary and Joseph were undocumented refugees.”

Some people like to call Jesus’s parents “undocumented immigrants” or “refugees”, for some reason. They were not any of those things. At least not until they fled to Egypt a couple of years after the birth of Jesus, which I’m pretty sure is not what these people have in mind.

“The story of Jesus is copied from earlier stories about gods like Horus, who were said to have been born of a virgin under a star in the east, been subject to assassination attempts as babies, fasted for 40 days, had 12 disciples, performed the same miracles, been crucified and resurrected after three days, etc.”

If you actually read the stories of those gods from sources written before the New Testament, you will not find most of these alleged parallels. The story of Horus’s birth, for example, is that he was born after his mother had sex with her brother who she had reassembled after he was killed and dismembered by another of her brothers. Doesn’t sound anything like the story of Jesus, does it?

(The idea that Jesus was born on the 25th of December probably was copied from the god Mithra, but that claim about Jesus isn’t even in the Bible, so who cares about that?)

Some things in the Bible do seem suspiciously similar in some ways to the myths of older religions. But that doesn’t mean anyone “stole ideas” from another religion. For one thing, the concept of stealing ideas doesn’t even apply when you’re talking about stories that are meant to be true.

The intention was probably more to correct what the Bible writers thought the pagans were getting wrong. The pagan stories had elements that the Hebrews and Christians found objectionable, so they wrote their own “corrected” versions. For instance, taking a story that portrays country people (like the ancient Hebrews mostly were) unflatteringly, and turning it into a story about the inventor of cities being the first murderer.

“The Bible is an arbitrary collection of books that were chosen by a vote at the Council of Nicea.“

So says The Da Vinci Code, but that story isn’t known for its historical accuracy. Learn about the real origins of the Bible. The Bible did come to be for a lot of ridiculous bad reasons as a result of mistaken beliefs, obviously flawed methods, and arbitrary decisions, but none of that involved a meeting that decided on the canon all at once.

“The Bible we have now is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., so we don’t really know what the original said.”

It’s true that we don’t really know exactly what the original scriptures said, because the earliest manuscripts we have now are not the earliest versions that ever existed. And it’s true that there have been some versions of the Bible that were made by going through at least two iterations of translation. (And that the gospels were originally written in a different language from what Jesus spoke.) But biblical manuscripts do still exist in the languages they were originally written in, and Bible translations are generally made by translating directly from those.

Biblical contradictions and errors

“The Bible absurdly implies that snakes used to have legs.”

Genesis has God punish the serpent by making it “crawl on its belly” and “eat dust”, which arguably implies that snakes were originally able to walk instead of slither. But even if that interpretation is indeed what the Bible means, it’s not exactly factually incorrect. Snakes evolved from lizards, so they did used to have legs! Some kinds of snakes even still have tiny vestigial hind legs. The Garden of Eden story is absurd because it says the snake could talk, not because it suggests that it might have been able to walk.

“The chapter before the Tower of Babel story contradicts it by saying the world was already divided into nations with their own languages.”

Genesis 10 is a genealogy that spans several generations. The story in Genesis 11 is set at some point during the time covered in Genesis 10. So the Bible just isn’t putting everything in chronological order here. The alternative would be to interrupt the genealogy by inserting a story in the middle of it, which the Bible should not be expected to do.

“The Bible contradicts itself regarding the nationality of the people who brought Joseph to Egypt.”

The Bible seems to call the same people Midianites and Ishmaelites, both here in Genesis and later in Judges. That’s not unreasonable when the Ishamelites had apparently taken over Midian.

“The Bible says bats are birds.”

Not really. It includes bats in a category that usually gets translated as “birds”, but that’s not exactly what the original Hebrew word means. So that’s just a problem with the translation.

Similarly, some translations of the New Testament say Jonah was swallowed by a whale, even though the Old Testament says it was a fish, but the original words those were translated from don’t have the exact same meanings as these modern English words.

“The Bible gets the value of pi wrong.”

Not really. The value implied in the Bible isn’t exactly equal to pi, but neither is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.⁴

How precise do you expect these measurements to be? The Bible doesn’t specify lengths in units shorter than a cubit all that often. If the circumference of a circle is 30 cubits, then the diameter, calculated using the correct value of pi and rounded to the nearest cubit, is 10 cubits. Which is what the Bible says it was. The numbers the Bible gives for this are a perfectly reasonable approximation.

“Alabama lawmakers once attempted to legally define pi as 3, to make it conform to the Bible.”

That story originated as an April Fool’s joke. The closest thing to that that ever happened in real life was the so-called “Indiana pi bill“, which was a case of someone mistakenly thinking he had solved a notorious mathematical problem, and then going about publishing his findings in a wildly wrong way. But that bill did not actually involve any direct statements about pi, and none of the various incorrect values of pi that can be derived from the bill are equal to the supposedly biblical value 3, so it was clearly not biblically motivated.

“The Bible wrongly states that ants have no leaders.”

The Bible makes a lot of scientifically inaccurate claims, but this is not one of them. Ants have no central leadership. “Queen” ants do not give orders to other ants. They just lay eggs.

“The Bible inconsistently says that Herod died when Jesus was a child, but then was still alive when Jesus was an adult.”

There were actually a bunch of people named Herod, who were all part of the same royal family. It can get confusing, especially since the Bible doesn’t tend to make it very clear which Herod it’s referring to.

The king who the Bible says tried to kill baby Jesus was Herod the Great, and the one who had John the Baptist killed when Jesus was an adult was one of Herod the Great’s sons, Herod Antipas.

So that part is not an error. However, there is still an inconsistency in the Bible involving Herod and Jesus: It claims that Jesus was born while Herod the Great was king of Judea and also while Quirinius was governor of Syria, which is a historical impossibility. Quirinius didn’t become governor till several years after Herod the Great died.

“The Bible has two contradictory versions of the loaves and fishes miracle story.”

The Bible is full of contradictions, but this is not one of them either. The two loaves and fishes stories are meant to be about two different events. You can tell because after both of those events happen (in the same gospel), Jesus mentions both of them having happened.

“Paul’s statement about Cretan liars is paradoxical and can’t be true.”

Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that Cretans are always liars, which Paul agrees is true. This may sound like a liar paradox, but it isn’t really. If Cretans are always liars, that doesn’t mean Cretans always lie whenever they speak. It just means every Cretan is a liar. And being a liar does not mean that everything you say is a lie. (If that was what that word meant, “liars” wouldn’t exist. No one tells nothing but lies.) So it is perfectly logically possible and non-paradoxical for a Cretan to be a liar and also to say something true.

Continue reading Things atheists get wrong →