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.

“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 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 getting almost there and being turned away.

“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. 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.

“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 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. 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.

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 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.

“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 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.¹

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.

“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. 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.

“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?)

“Jesus never existed.”

The idea that Jesus never existed at all (as opposed to the idea that he really lived, but then 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.

Before you make such a strong claim, 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?

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 hometown² 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 these things being included in the stories would seem to be that there was a Jesus, and these facts about him were too well known to deny.

“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.³

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.⁴ 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.

Continue reading Things atheists get wrong →