Sam Harris on religion

Curmudgeonly Yours

A pig’s ear of an argument

Edit: Some of this post is no longer relevant as the person in question has since changed his blog entry.

Yesterday, Twelve of the Broken Microwave blog wrote about a recent “argument” that he was engaged in with an atheist. (Actually, it was two atheists, but I just want to concentrate on what he said to the alleged less experienced atheist.) Suspiciously, Twelve neglected to link to wherever it was that the said argument had taken place, thus not allowing anybody to see the argument in context.

The atheist is quoted as having said:

Did you know Jesus in the bible killed a herd of pigs? Really. He really did. So much for Gentle Jesus! Matthew 8:32 And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, the devils went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

That makes Jesus nastier than the average person. He could have found a much kinder way of doing this. Jesus shows by this one act that he was immoral.

According to Twelve, the atheist was wrong and guilty of doing “no research” when he claimed that Jesus had killed a herd of pigs and when he concluded that this one act caused Jesus to appear quite nasty, not at all kind and without scruples.

A sensible reading of the scriptural verses in question shows that Jesus was indeed culpable in the deaths of the Gadarene swine. There’s just no getting around that, unless you’re a Christian who thinks that God can do no wrong. After all, who was it who permitted the devils to enter the herd of pigs that were feeding nearby? Jesus. The devils sought his permission and he gave it.

Although this is a case of animal cruelty, my main problem with this story is Jesus’s apparent indifference towards the owner of the pigs whose livelihood had perished in the sea and the swineherds who had suddenly found themselves redundant. The latter – upon seeing Jesus’s dubious moral character – fled into the city and told the people about what had happened, to which the “whole city” came out to meet with Jesus and “besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.” Can you blame them? Whose livelihood would be next on the chopping block?

There’s no indication that Jesus offered any recompense to the owner or his employees for the disaster that had befallen them. I concur with what the atheist concluded from this story. Jesus does seem to have an unlikeable side to him. You’d think that as an omnipotent being he could have thought of a better way of dealing with the devils, without impacting adversely on the lives of innocent people.

Twelve responded to the atheist by suddenly talking about a totally different time and situation – the tenth plague that was inflicted upon Egypt by an ever-loving God. I was confused by the jump. After quoting the atheist on his blog, Twelve said, simply:

This just screams, “No research!” so I replied with this:

I concluded that Twelve had left out certain pertinent parts of his argument with the atheist, for reasons that I can only guess at. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was being deliberately vague for some reason and, if so, that might very well explain why he hadn’t linked to where the argument had taken place.

Anyway, the first sentence of Twelve’s reply clearly showed that more had gone on between what the atheist had said and his response to it:

observingworld [the atheist], I know the firstborns didn’t do anything, but Pharaoh was the one who decided the fate of those animals and children, not God. God gave Pharaoh a choice, and he chose to have all of the firstborns killed. That’s not God’s fault. If the cattle died, that’s Pharaoh’s decision. No matter how unfair it was for the firstborns to die for Pharaoh’s mistake, the blame doesn’t fall on God, but Pharaoh.

This appears to be to a response to something else that was said and not to what had been initially said. Twelve seems to be rather disingenuous.

Anyway, I’m continually flabbergasted by Christians like Twelve who try to make a silk purse out of any story from the Bible, no matter how much of a sow’s ear it really is when you discard the believer’s bias.

Notwithstanding that God had hardened the heart of Pharaoh against giving in to his demands, there’s still no way that Pharaoh was to blame for the death of “all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast”, which resulted in there being not a house where there would not be somebody dead. The holy plague touched every Egyptian family. And, who knows, maybe if God hadn’t messed around with Pharaoh’s heart, this tragedy might never have happened. It’s almost as if God wanted the opportunity to slaughter thousands of people to demonstrate his power.

Imagine that an Islamic hijacker had taken control of an American aeroplane and was demanding that the government release all of the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay or he would blow up the plane on the orders of Allah with all the innocent passengers on board. The US president refused to capitulate and so the hijacker carried out his threat. Is this scenario any different than the dilemma that faced Pharaoh? The central issue in both situations is the use of blackmail as a motivating force in achieving a certain aim, where the lives of innocent people are used as bargaining tools. How moral is that?

And as a leopard cannot change his spots, so God is continuing to blackmail people into heaven in this day and age. He’s still the monster he’s always been, as is abundantly evident in the Bible, threatening everlasting punishment on those who don’t submit to his demands of obedience.

Curmudgeonly Yours

Ridiculous argument

Now I don’t claim to be particularly intelligent and my husband will tell you that I’m certainly not the most logical person in the world, but some of the arguments that Christians put forward for their beliefs, especially in an attempt to rubbish atheism, are just totally ridiculous. Take this one, for instance, made by some woman called Janet M. LaRue:

“As a lawyer, I’ve spent my career studying evidence. I’m quite confident that any objective and open-minded person who seriously considers the case for the empty tomb will be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Christ is the Lord of Life as He claimed. Those who criticize the resurrection as the best explanation for the empty tomb call it an argument from silence. But all they offer are irrational arguments from silence—the body could have been exhumed, somebody stole it, He didn’t really die, or everybody went to the wrong tomb. The evidence hasn’t been effectively rebutted in more than two thousand years.”

Please tell me what planet this person is living on. To follow Ms LaRue’s reasoning, we first have to set aside the fact that there is no definite evidence that the person Christians call Christ ever even existed or, supposing he did, that he was the son of a god, or that he was killed, or that he was placed in a tomb, rather than in the communal grave that was the fate of crucified criminals of the day.

But, let’s be charitable and ignore these difficulties, so that we can examine her “convincing” case for the resurrection. And what is it, pray tell? Well, of course it should be obvious to any right-thinking person that the only explanation for an empty tomb is that the occupant magically came back to life after he had been dead for (depending on which gospel account you read) several hours or several days. How irrational of anyone to put forward the notion that the body may have been exhumed, stolen, carried away or – and this, I know, is probably the most unbelievable of all – was never deposited there in the first place. No, Occam’s Razor notwithstanding, the only possible explanation for the empty tomb just has to be resurrection. A feat that has never been heard of before or since – let’s remember that it didn’t just involve coming back to life, but actually coming back with a body that would never be subject to death again – but nevertheless, according to Ms LaRue, without doubt the most reasonable of all explanations.

I presume the “evidence” that “hasn’t effectively been rebutted” is the biblical account, which we all know is totally reliable, was written down at the exact time the events it describes occurred, has never been tampered with or re-translated in any way and accords perfectly with the archaeological and historical record of the day.

Silly atheists, for doubting such a convincing first-hand account of indisputable veracity. Ms LaRue’s clever, lawyerly argument has put us properly on the back foot. How could we have got it so wrong in the face of such overwhelming evidence?

IslaSkye