Potted history of the King James New Testament

The Glucifixion.

No More Nails - The Glucifixion by basegobemouche

Christmas Traditions compared

The 6 Moral Dealbreakers of Christianity

Religion is not the source of morality

Letter to the Evening Standard, 5 July 2015

RE Melanie McDonagh’s article [Comment, June 1], any school that promotes values as uniquely “Christian” is giving their pupils a skewed and very poor understanding of ethics.

For too long we have ring-fenced religious ideas for privileged treatment in schools giving pupils the misleading impression that moral questions always need to be considered through a religious prism. They do not.

Replacing religious education with philosophy and ethics would enable future generations to take a more objective and religiously neutral approach to the consideration of moral and ethical issues.

Young people could still be taught about Christianity and other religious beliefs but not at the expense of all other ways of understanding the world in which they live.

Stephen Evans, National Secular Society

Christianity demolished.

Creationism in action

See the crass, arrogant, ignorance bred by religious belief and pity her poor children.

How to remain Christian.

Christian logic

Spot the bullshit . . .

How to talk to a Christian

"If you wake up tomorrow morning and think that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them into the body of Elvis Presley you're said to be out of your mind. If you think the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus you're just a Catholic."

Christianity in perspective.

Be sure to scroll down to the end.

Craig caught carping

A 1.5 minute long neat exposé of WLC's debating modus operandi; spin, distortion of facts and aggressive volubility.

Bibleheads

"Biblehead" is a very apt name for a particular type of religious nutter that atheist bloggers will be very familiar with. They use the bible as a substitute for rational thought, and have convinced themselves that a crushing response to sceptics is provided by quoting lengthy tracts, often with little relevance to the subject under discussion. They simultaneously seem have blinded themselves of the provenance of the bible; of its long, long history of oral transmisson, translation, editing, selection, so that, whatever the literary merits of the modern version they happen to be familiar with, it  bears little resemblance to whatever Moses thought God had said or to what Jesus himself said, if he existed, and that is by no means certain

The bible is simply a distillation mostly by 'chinese-whispers' of  the myths and superstitions of nomadic bronze-age goatherds who lived short, fear-ridden, violent lives, that bibleheads have indoctrinated themselves to believe has some relevance to the modern era. Any good that has come out of it has been filtered out by the developing humanity and rationality of the intervening generations.

So having a book handed to you with the explanation that it contains everything you need to know is very comforting, allowing you to believe that you are far more in control of your scary world than you would be otherwise. It's delusional, but for most people not being hit by lightning, or succumbing to infectious diseases, or being killed by natural disasters, there is no reason to believe otherwise. And those exceptions, well, they can be rationalized away too, simply by referring to this book.

With such a handy dandy guide to life, you really don't need to even think about or acknowledge your real ignorance.

Crucifixion nonsense

A long but very rewarding debate.

Awkward questions for Theists - No.5

How are the rites of Mass or the Eucharist and various other religious practices distinguishable from those of witchcraft or voodoo?

Awkward question for Theists - No.1

Awkward question for Theists - No.2

Awkward question for Theists - No.3

Awkward question for Theists - No.4

Just another Christian . . .

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.

 ~ Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922

Modern Christianity

A sceptic's guide to religious belief in the 21st Century

God is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that created the Universe in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. We know this for certain because God specially created us so that we could say so. However God didn't need us to say so until about 13,695 billion years after the Big Bang; so he either carefully tuned the Big Bang initial conditions or, once having set things in motion, he dropped by every few billion years, firstly tweaking cosmological evolution to produce the Earth, and then biological evolution on Earth itself. God exists outside time and space yet manages to intervene in time & space. This is said to be "moving in mysterious ways". 

God, existing outside time & space, is of course invisible and undetectable yet we know at least something about him because it is said we were created "in his image". This doesn't mean we look like him, (don't be silly) so the fact that he is male needn't cause us females too much angst, especially as he is invisible.. Maybe it just means we think like him. Even so, perhaps as existence was boring,  he also made us so we would sometimes think naughty thoughts and do naughty things, and he knew all along that we would. He also wanted us to know that he, being God is much godlier, even infinitely godlier, than us and would therefore be forgiving us for all our naughties since he made us like that.

God signalled his forgiveness in a way that is rather difficult to understand. One first needs to know that God is composed of 3 parts (but definitely not a tribunal. that's a real no-no; this is strictly a Monotheistic religion we are talking about here). To make sure there is no confusion we call God a "Trinity" and the three parts are known as "God the Father"; "God the Daughter"; whoops, sorry "God the Son", and God the Holy Ghost. 

That having been established we can get back to God's scheme for forgiveness. By means we needn't go into here, (save that it involves the Holy Ghost and even some Christians have doubts about its veracity,) the God Trinity decides ( I assume it was a joint decision) that the Son bit should appear on Earth as a man called Jesus. On Earth in a backward, illiterate corner of the Middle East, his chief occupation would be wandering about telling everyone how wonderful God was, how they should behave, and throwing in the odd miracle to get attention. Being God he already knew of course that that would greatly annoy the existing religious hierarchy and ruling power and  would eventually get him horribly tortured and crucified to death. This however was all part of the Godly plan. By sacrificing himself to himself he apparently atoned for all the sins he knew the human race were going to commit from when he made them half a million years previously into the indefinite future. We are so lucky!

To absolutely clinch matters he got up from his tomb a few days later and walked about a bit before ascending finally into Heaven in a bright light. This greatly impressed his groupies who went on wandering about for years stirring up trouble until a later Roman Emperor for the sake of a quiet life decided to humour them. And the rest is real history. 

Progress & religion 1967 - 2012

Simple Faith