The Analogy

In life we have this predicament, this certain view of how things are. Most all of us view reality as us being thrown into the world, and being in it, and having to navigate it, and having things "happen" to you. It's you and the world outside of you, and the world outside of you doesn't always conform to what you want, and the struggle of life is to try to get things the way that you want them to be. You are trying to shape the outside world and force it to comply. It is an other, an opposing force. And all our suffering is a result of the outside world playing out in a way that is contrary to how we wish it to be, as if we had a say! As if the universe, this grand "other" agent that we are just thrown into, should center all its vast workings around meeting the arbitrary standards made up by us, and that you're only truly "living" when that happens. We construct these standards ourselves, and little known to us is that from the outset there is no reason we should expect them to happen at all. It is self-defeating. Why do we get to dictate how things will be? Our view is this: as seats of consciousness in a sea of other unconscious things, we are alone and are separate from the things around us.

But let me give an analogy to try to demonstrate why this is not so. Consider an eddy in an ocean. We've all seen them; the tiny whirlpools that form when water currents brush past each other. Some last for a long time, some only half a second. They are patterns. They are orderly; a spiral that maintains the same form over time, until it dissipates. They are orderly forms amongst a sea of non-orderly water. We too are patterns. Like eddies, living things are patterns that arise just from interactions between matter; life is a necessary consequence of physical laws. Nothing wills an eddy to become an eddy. The eddy simply must occur in certain conditions, otherwise it is not water. Like eddies, humans are a pattern, not a set physical entity. The only thing required for an eddy to be and eddy is the spiral form of water. Its actual substance is constantly in flux. The eddy you see in one second is totally different from the eddy in the next; just like a person on one day is a completely different person the next. Their physical substance isn't the same, they have different moods, they look different from the events that occurred the day before, and think slightly differently due to the prior day's experience. But the pattern is there. It is still recognizably that same person, because the arrangement of the pattern is what's important, not the content.

So, here we are, humans in a universe, eddies in an ocean. But just imagine if an eddy became conscious and developed a "self". It would say "I am an eddy. I am a separate thing. Here is me and here is the ocean. I see this vast, unorganized water around me which is my environment, and it is unconscious and I am placed within it." And eventually it would become attached to its own singular point of view, and assign great importance to it, ascribing all these special values and standards and needs that must be met to please it. And it would fear and hate waves, for if a wave came an eddy would be disturbed, and the standards it had set for its life would not be met. It may even perish. The imagined barrier between it and the ocean would cause it much suffering.

But what is the reality? The reality is that the eddy IS the ocean, and the ocean is the eddy. Even the waves are itself! The eddy is made of ocean, and it had to form. Neither the ocean nor the eddy had a choice in this matter. The initial conditions were the way they were, and the eddy happened. In fact, given those conditions, if the eddy had not come into being, then this would not be an ocean. This ocean could not be at all if this eddy was not in existence right here, right now, and for this certain duration. The eddy is part of the ocean's definition; its very nature. The two are mutually dependent on each other's existence.

The point to be made is that when you look out into the world, the necessary conclusion is that all the things around you (all things) are what you are. This is a literal statement. Just like those of the eddy and the ocean, all the conditions that you encounter are necessary for you to exist at all, and likewise, you are dependent on those conditions to define yourself. So all the things that happen to you must happen in order for you to be. Humans are to the universe what an eddy is to the ocean. We are it.

Our minds are like troubleshooters or filters, paying attention only to things that are a either danger to us or things that we view as beneficial. But to remove that filter is to tough upon our actual nature: entirety, allness, oneness, and with the view that everything is one expression. If an eddy says "I am," we know that that is only true from a single, narrow perspective. So for a human to say "I am" is to subscribe to the smaller mind, the mind of locales and comparisons and separations. The realization is that everything - the color of a flower, the feel of a breeze, the sound of a helicopter, your own thoughts, a car wreck, the death of a friend - they are all you, and you are them. All these things must occur exactly when they do, and exactly in the way that they do, or else the universe could not be.

The benefit of this is that we can view negative events in our lives the same way we view a gust of wind: that it simply occurred. It is all part of this cacophonous pattern that is teeming on the surface of the earth, a pattern whose form must be only as it is, with no other choice. If we can accept our place in this maelstrom of activity, then we can view all events as of equal supreme importance. All things before us become real, and our attention begins to shift. We no longer hold the universe accountable to us, and thus realize that everything we "need" is right here and right now. And we would view our lives as a grand ballet, a brilliant, shifting, shimmering display of energy and color and form, where everything is connected, and all distances and boundaries are imaginary. And be able to relish in the joy that we can move about and create, and touch our universe and feel and see. And we can know that when we experience all these things, we are experiencing our own nature in the deepest and truest sense.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

“By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”
~ AnswersinGenesis.org (http://www.answersingenesis.org/about/faith)

Of all the jaw-dropping statements made by Christians, this one takes the cake. Answers in Genesis is one of the biggest and most popular apologetics websites, giving Christian arguments in favor of the flood, the 6-day creation, the 6,000-year-old earth, and dinosaurs living with humans. But I believe that this statement in their “Statement of Faith” completely removes any integrity from its authors.

This quote is saying that before the folks at AnswersinGenesis.org look at any evidence, before they think about or approach the problem at all, they have already decided the outcome. They completely base their findings on their own preconceptions, preemptively plugging their ears and eyes and accepting only what they already assume. Their is no worse way to pursue truth than that.

The criticism I make here has been responded to by some, claiming that going off the authority of the Bible is no different than going off the authority of science. But science doesn’t operate off of authority. Claims in science aren’t true merely because someone said they are. The conclusions of scientists are based on evidence, and the evidence remains for all to see. Scientists know that their ideas must stand to the scrutiny of other scientists, who may not share their preconceptions. The way to do this is to make the case strong enough on the basis of evidence so that preconceptions don’t matter.

The history of science is filled with scientists accepting ideas contrary to their preconceptions. Examples include the reality of extinctions, the reality of meteors, meteors as causes of mass extinctions, ice ages, continental drift, bacteria as cause of ulcers, and of course, evolution. Scientists are not immune to being sidetracked by their preconceptions, but ultimately go where the evidence leads.

Scientists make a deliberate effort to remove subjectivity from their work, and do a good job in general of removing bias. They do such a good job, in fact, that what creationists really object to is the fact that scientists do no interpret evidence according to certain religious preconceptions.

- Evan

A Foundation of Sand

Christianity relies on the authenticity of the New Testament of the Bible as a true, first-hand account of Jesus’ life. Arguments from design and from the creation of the universe are arguments from ignorance (god-of-the-gaps), and don’t prove the Christian god. Rather, they leave us with a vague super-being with any number of unknowable attributes. Miracle stories lack any good evidence beyond that of hearsay and anecdote, and evidence for the supernatural in general has never been verifiable. This leaves only the Bible (specifically the New Testament) as the one thing that Christians can point to as supporting their beliefs.

Before I go on, however, we must make one thing clear. Even if the Bible were a document written by eye-witnesses, that would lend nothing to the truth of those claims. That people merely said it does not make it true. We could drive out to New Mexico and gather stories of U.F.O. abductions from entire communities, families, and individuals, some of which are mysteriously unexplainable and morbidly intriguing, but these people’s words say nothing about the truth of those words. Instead we require real, hard evidence for such claims, not merely stories. Words do not prove themselves. This is the larger point, a reasonable general principle that overshadows the historical unreliability of the Bible that will be later shown.

There is also the reasonable assertion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They require extraordinary evidence because the observation of a supernatural entity/event would be highly unusual. Also, proponents often claim that these events violate the known laws of science, making them difficult to square with the way the universe is understood to work. Even a good historical account of a supernatural event would not be good enough evidence of their truth. We would need much more extra support before a rational person could accept them as true.

Moreover, a common apologist claim is that all of written history is from the mouths of people, so we can trust the Bible just like the history books. If that were true, we could equally trust the Quran and the Bhagavad-Gita as true historical accounts. There are differing levels of reliability of historical sources, and in this post I will discuss the unreliability of the New Testament as an authentic source.

The four Gospels are the primary books of the Bible that narrate the life of Jesus. These are the closest thing we have to historical sources about him. He is not mentioned by any contemporary historians, so his life and his miracles are not verified by any third party. But these Gospels, on face value, are not reliable sources. Basic scholarship reveals that these books were not written by the people attributed to them. They are all internally anonymous (they don’t mention the author within the text) and we have no original signed copies. The names of the four apostles were not attributed to the texts until the late 2nd century, and as late as the 4th c. in the case of Mark. Furthermore, they were written many years after the events they describe. Mark, the earliest Gospel, was written no earlier than year 70, a full 40 years after the supposed death and resurrection of Jesus. And the Gospel of John, which differs highly from the other three, was written as late as the early 2nd century.

What furthermore calls the eye-witness nature of the Gospels into question is that Mark, Matthew, and Luke are directly based on each other, with large slabs of text copied word for word. Why would an eye-witness rely so heavily on a third-party account? Inconsistencies between the four Gospels also makes the idea of eye-witness authors less likely. Not counting the inconsistencies between Matthew, Mark, and Luke (such as the differing versions of the empty tomb story) The Gospel of John differs radically in its content and claims from the other gospels, such as the date of the last supper and even larger details such as Jesus’ performance of miracles and his stance on Judaic law.

Much of the rest of the New Testament is attributed to Paul of Tarsus and Luke the Evangelist. However, by their own admission, neither of them had ever met Jesus (but Paul claimed that he saw a vision of Jesus while traveling on the road to Damascus).

A further issue is that there are known forgeries and edits to the text of the Bible that were added for years after the original writing. For instance, the last few passages of Mark are not in the original copy that we have, having been added some time in the mid 2nd century. Some denominations such as the Pentacostal church base their teachings off of these known forgeries. Early copyists of the Bible were often illiterate themselves (most early Christians were from the lower, uneducated class), and could only copy letter-by-letter, greatly increasing the likelihood of error. There are known cases of early Christians intentionally changing the canon in order to more closely align the text with their personal take on the religion. To quote Origen, a 3rd-c. church father, “The difference among the manuscripts have become great, either through negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please."

This information is not the view of fringe-atheists. It is widely accepted by Bible scholars, and even some Bibles such as New International Version make notes of some of this on their relevant title pages. The Gospels are not the sort of sources that would be used to make a history book, and would not be accepted in a court of law. They make several grandiose claims such as the dead rising from their graves and walking through the streets of Jerusalem, and a mass exodus in the Roman empire with everyone having to return to their place of ancestry for an empire-wide census. If these events were even remotely true, we should expect some sort of third-party mention of them in the detailed Roman and Jewish annals. Instead we find nothing. There is no reliable evidence, within or outside the Bible, to support any of the claims about Jesus as his spectacular life.

- Evan

Video: Feynmann on Flying Saucers

This is a good point about any claims that lack evidence.

Some Poignant Quotes

Just a few quotes I have come across over the years of exploring freethinking/atheism material on the web. Some of them help to wrap up effective points into small packages.

"If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
"
~ Thomas Szasz

"Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
"
~ Ron Patterson

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.
"
~ Adolf Hitler (just to debunk the myth of Hitler being an atheist)

"To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
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~ Julian Ruck

"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."

~ Jack Gurney – “The Ruling Class”

“...if the definition of God is unfalsifiable, the question of the existence of God is meaningless.”
~ freethoughtpedia.com

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."


~ Gene Roddenberry

Video Series 7: Feynman on Science and Not Knowing

Renowned physicist Richard Feynman speaks about science, knowledge, and not knowing.

On the Supernatural

During the entire history of mankind, there has never been any independently verifiable evidence of the supernatural. Indeed, many proponents of the supernatural realm hardly have any idea what implications such a realm would have in the observable world, let alone any ideas of how to prove its existence. In previous posts, I have insisted that a rational person should have evidence of something before it is believed. This is hardly a novel thought, and I think anyone would agree with it. But due to the supposed non-physical nature of the supernatural, religious people feel they are exempt from having any burden of proof. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone has a reason for believing something, and we can honestly say that with the supernatural, evidence is not it.

As the first basic precept of religion, proving the existence of a supernatural realm should be at the top of the believer’s list of things to do. It should come before any other arguments, because if the supernatural does not exist, nothing in their religion is true. Given the very definition of immaterial, acceptable evidence for may never surface. This leaves argument as the only tool one can use to justify belief, but the arguments I have heard make flawed assumptions.

• Some mysterious or unknown feature of our universe (before the big bang, beauty in nature, physical laws, complexity of life). Things that are unknown are unknown. The ignorance of a cause for something does not make it magic. Things like the stars, the weather, and disease used to be thought to have supernatural causes.
  
• The existence of morality and of abstract ideas and concepts in our brains as being separate from our physical reality. Every one of those thoughts, ideas and concepts we have we have — including morality (view video in previous post) — is a result of known physical processes in a physical brain.
• The authority of the Bible. What if the only evidence for evolution was a book, and not all that observation, experiment, and not the independent lines of verification from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics, molecular biology, developmental biology, embryology, population genetics, genome sequencing, and many other sciences?
  

Skeptics of the supernatural have often been called “closed-minded," and accused of bias towards a particular world-view. This is an disingenuous thing to say. Anyone can agree that it is not close-minded to require evidence for beliefs. If you can’t provide the evidence for something, you shouldn’t malign those who don't believe it. How can you blame them for not believing you? If your position takes faith to begin with, you cannot expect others to follow suit. But more to the point, if your position takes faith to believe it, maybe you shouldn’t have so much confidence in your position.

- Evan

Video Series 6: Morality and the Brain

A study that revealed some strange facts about our brain and our moral choices.

Video Series 5: Universe Size Comparison

I don't know why I haven't posted this video before. It is the most mind-blowing thing on the internet. Prepare for your brain to explode.

Video Series 4: Music and Life

Alan Watts was a British philosopher and was famous for his talks on Eastern philosophy and Buddhist ideas.

Video Series 3: Critical Thinking

Qualiasoup's YouTube channel is a full of video gems about belief, knowledge, morality, and reason. They are some of the most eloquently-spoken, well-animated, engaging, and effective discussions of these topics on the web.

Video Series 2: Space Station Time-lapse

An amazing view of the blue marble, our home, shot in time-lapse from the International Space Station.

Video Series 1: The Lung Fish

I have returned :) A series of short videos for the next several posts, on science, reason, morality, and humanity. Enjoy!


An amazing little creature, using its swim bladder to breathe air during yearly droughts, then hibernating until the rains come.

Atheists: brave agnostics

There is not a big difference between an atheist and an agnostic. They both don’t know whether or not a god exists. The difference is that atheists aren’t afraid to just lump god in with all the other stuff that we don’t have evidence for. There is no evidence against fairies or leprechauns, and no one knows that they don’t exist. But you don’t believe in fairies, they aren’t real. If someone were to ask you if fairies were real, you would say “no” with a good bit of certainty. This is because in our day-to-day lives, we don’t think in terms of absolute knowledge, but rather practical knowledge. There is no evidence for fairies, so we don’t believe. It would be pointless to spend the rest of our lives debating in our heads whether or not they exist. An atheist treats God the same way. No atheist knows there is no god (even Richard Dawkins admits this), but can still say with certainty that one doesn’t exist based on a lack of evidence. So come on agnostics, make the switch! Treat god like everything else.

Similar to fairies, leprechauns, the Lochness monster, and Bigfoot, God to me seems to be a human construct. Who wrote the Bible? Humans, of course. Whether or not God guided the hands of those humans is something that Christians cannot demonstrate, so why believe it?

Being agnostic is good in that you recognize the state of your knowledge about god. You don’t know, and may never know. There’s no proof either way. These are true statements. However, they are also true for other issues such as mythological creatures. So in reality, an agnostic doesn’t believe, and is simply admitting the fragility of their knowledge. However, we shouldn’t hold God on such a pedestal. Your knowledge is fragile in every area, and you can’t be agnostic about everything. What you believe and don’t believe is all about evidence.

- Evan

“Intelligent Design” = Religious Creationism

Creationism is a religious idea of the beginning of the universe. There have been as many creation myths as religions, and no one myth is better than the other. The high amount of Christianity in the United States has led to a movement seeking to belittle the scientific advances we’ve had on the origin of life and advance the Christian creation myth, having it taught as if it were science. The movement has made many claims that certain scientific facts back up creationism, but most of these claims have revealed the movement’s lack of scientific literacy and have been debunked. I will address these specific claims in later blogs, but today I will talk about the credibility of the creationism movement.

Merely believing in creationism is one thing, but many try to make it appear as a scientific theory, giving it a credible-sounding name (“Intelligent Design” or ID), wanting it taught in schools, and saying that it’s an “alternative” theory with much evidence in its favor, all the while making ill-informed criticisms of evolution. ID is not mainstream science as its proponents claim. The movement has shown itself time and time again to simply be a propaganda machine trying to give the appearance of respectability:

• a 2003 poll showed support for teaching of intelligent design, but was found to be falsely reported and worthless to begin with

• the Discovery Institute presented a bibliography listing reputable scientists who had dissented with evolution and supported ID. When the scientists were contacted, they said their work did not support ID or challenge evolution, and many said their work was evidence against ID

• in order to get their promotional video on television, the ID movement deliberately hid the fact that it was about intelligent design

On top of the ID movement’s dishonesty, the “theory” itself has no explanatory power. A theory has explanatory power if facts can be deduced from it, and no facts have ever been deduced from ID theory. It may try to account for things we see, but accounting for things means nothing towards a theory’s truth. For instance, I can use my new “it’s magic” theory (IM) to say why things are the way they are. Now my theory can account for any fact anywhere, but it’s about as far from science as you can get. A real theory that reflects the workings of our world makes predictions and produces facts. ID has done neither.

In order for creationism to even be plausible, you must first show that there is a God, which is impossible to do. The “evidence” that the creationism movement shows for God (alleged failings of evolution and the big bang) is the same “evidence” they use to try and validate creationism, so there is a circular argument going on. It is no mystery why the scientific community doesn’t acknowledge creationism as an alternative: it is clearly motivated by religious theology and lacks the properties of a scientific theory.

- Evan

An Open Mind: seeking truth rather than knowing it

It has been commonly assumed that life started in some ‘primordial soup’ of chemicals on the planet, and that somehow these chemicals begat life. How life began was still a mystery, but this ‘primordial soup’ idea seemed the most plausible. However, on February 3rd, the 80-year-old theory involving the origin of life was overturned. Quoting the linked article, the primordial soup idea could not provide the “sustained driving force to make anything react, and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist.” The new idea is that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where there is bountiful energy and already-existing chemical processes that resemble what today’s cells use for respiration.

One goal of reasonable people is to never become attached to your beliefs about the world in any way. If we do this, we can easily and happily accept new and better ideas, discarding the old. This is how science works: being able to converge on truth by letting the evidence speak for itself. It can be a slow process sometimes - in this case an 80-year process - but it is sure and steady.

One reason I reject religion is its inability to find truth. There is no objective guide to what is correct and incorrect in religion; things cannot be falsified. So when someone has a new idea, who is to say whether they are right or wrong? This is why there are so many sects of all the different religions instead of a single unified one. How can we know which ideas are right? There are many competing ideas in science too, but they will be resolved eventually, just like all the other debates before them.

When we compare science to religion as far as a branching tree of ideas, we can visualize that religion, since the beginning, has branched off constantly, wandering about and creating thousands of incompatible and unverifiable ideologies, and has so far discovered nothing about the world. Visualizing the creation and discarding of ideas in science, we can see that science converges on itself, slowly weeding out the incorrect ideas and replacing them with good ones. New branches of ideas are common, but unless observations continue to validate their claims, the branch disappears entirely. If the new idea is validated, the entire scientific community accepts the idea and jumps on the train. Using this objective and evidence-based method, science has been our one and only way of making discoveries about the world.

To me, humbly and slowly approaching the truth by studying the world is better than having a faith-based belief that you already know the truth. Which one sounds better to you?

- Evan

Inerrant Errors, Infallible Fallacies

At the center of Christianity sits the Bible. This book is said to be instructions from a non-physical, supremely omnipotent, and perfectly good being - God - on how to live and get into Heaven. Heaven is a place of happiness and bliss that, if you follow God’s commands, you will go to after you’re dead. It also includes stories on how the universe was made, why humans are innately evil (as God says they are), and many stories of humans and their dealings with God, back when he used to show himself all the time. This book cannot contain errors, because if it did, it couldn’t be the word of an omnipotent being.

This book has glaring errors. There are scientific errors, historical errors, conflicting accounts of events, contradicting statements on right/wrong, contradicting statements on the nature of God, accounts of acts sanctified by God that are immoral today, and in general a lot of strange passages that don’t seem to belong in a perfect book. About half of the contradictions I have used here are taken from The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which is an invaluable source for this stuff.

Jesus himself states that religious laws are not absolute:

• in Matthew 5:38-39, he rejects the “eye for an eye” law (Exod. 21:23-25, Lev. 24:19-20, Deut. 19:21)
• in Mark 7:18-19, Jesus rejects all dietary law as described in Lev. 11
• in Mark 2:27-28, Jesus rejects the commandment (from THE ten commandments) about working on the Sabbath
• if Jesus consideredthat even the ten commandments were not inerrant, why should we consider the entire Bible to be inerrant?

Scientific errors:

• Lev. 11:6 states rabbits chew their cud
• Lev. 11:20-23 talks about four-legged insects, including grasshoppers
• 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 93:1 states that the Earth is immobile, but not only does in revolve around the sun, it is gravitationally influenced by other bodies
• Genesis 1: 1) states that the Earth was created from the beginning of the universe, when in fact the Earth formed 9.5 billion years after the beginning of our universe. 2) God creates light before he makes light-producing objects. 3) “night” and “day” existed before there was a sun to mark them.
  

Historical errors:

• no flood ever happened: Egypt had a flourishing civilization, starting long before Noah, and it was never interrupted by a flood
• there were a multitude of Egyptian scholars a the time of God’s ten curses on the Egyptians. You’d think someone would’ve mentioned raining frogs, devastating plagues, or all of the nation’s firstborn sons dying
• Daniel 5 states that Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, was succeeded on the throne by his son, Belshazzar. but historians tell us that Belshazzar was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king.
• the family lines of the Bible add up to an Earth that is about 6,000 years old. This is inconsistent with everything we know about the universe. Chemistry, physics, biology, geology, astronomy - all these fields tell us this isn’t true.

Contradictory accounts:

• there are two differing genesis accounts: one where the animals were created first, then the first man and woman created simultaneously (Gen. 1:25-27), and a second where man was created first, then the animals, then the woman from the man’s rib (Gen. 2:18-22)
• differing accounts of where Jesus first appeared to the eleven disciples after the resurrection: Matthew 28:16 says on top of a mountain in Galilee, while Mark 16:14, Luke 24:33-37, and John 20:19 state that it was in a room in Jerusalem.
• when did Jesus ascend into Heaven after the resurrection? On the day of his resurrection: Luke 24:1-51, Mark 16:9-19. At least 8 days after the resurrection: John 20:26. “Many” days after the resurrection: Acts 13:31. 40 days after the resurrection: Acts 1:2-3, 9
• who buried Jesus? Joseph of Arimathea: Matthew 27:57-60, Mark 15:43-46, Luke 23:50-53. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus: John 19:38-42. The Jews and their rulers: Acts 13:27-29
  
• two very conflicting genealogies of Jesus: Mark 1:6-16 and Luke 3:21-31
• I have also posted a video in the links on the right of the page about the many glaring contradictions between the Four Gospels’ account of Jesus’ tomb after the resurrection.

The nature of God:

• Can God do anything? Yes: Luke 1:37, Jeremiah 32:27. No: Judges 1:19, Hebrews 6:18
• Is God the creator of evil? Yes: Isaiah 45:7. No: 1 John 4:8
• Should we fear God? Yes: Lev. 25:17. No: 2 Timothy 1:7
• Does God lie? Yes: Ezekiel 14:9, 2 Thessalonians 2:11. No: Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18
• Does God love everyone? Yes: 1 John 4:16, John 3:16. No: Psalm 11:5, Romans 9:13
• Does God know and see everything? Yes: Jeremiah 23:24, Proverbs 15:3. No: Gen. 3:8, Gen 18:9.

Morals:

• How should you treat your enemies? Love and be kind to them: Matthew 5:44, Proverbs 25:21. Hate and wish evil upon them: Psalm 35:6, 8, Psalm 69:22-28
• Should we judge people? Yes: Lev. 19:15, John 7:24. No: Matthew 7:1, Luke 6:37.
• Is it okay to lie? Yes: 1 Kings 22:21-22, 2 Kings 8:10. No: Exod. 20:16, Proverbs 12:22.
• Is it wrong to steal? Yes: Exodus 20:15, Mark 10:19. No: Ezekiel 39:10, Exod. 3:22
• What must you do to be saved?

Immorality of God:

• Story of Jephthah, Judges 11: Jephthah asks God for military victory, and in return Jephthah promises to kill whoever comes out of his house first to greet him when he returns, and offer the body up to God (trade military victory for human sacrifice). God accepts his deal, and helps Jephthah commit a “great slaughter.” Jephthah then goes home and sacrifices his daughter.
• Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19: God basically nukes two cities. Surely there were innocent children? He also chooses Lot and his family to be allowed to escape before the nuking, because they are good and should not be killed. But then Lot’s wife turns back to look at the destruction, and gets turned into a pillar of salt, and Lot himself gets drunk in a cave and impregnates his two daughters.

One flaw is all it takes to stop something from being inerrant. Here I have listed only a fraction of them. To see more, I highly recommend visiting The Skeptic's Annotated Bible.

- Evan

We Humans on the Ancient Earth

The human line hails from humble origins. An unsurprising fact, since most life does. The rise of humanity from a lemur-like creature to an ape-like creature to an upright-walker to today’s humans is a remarkable story, one far more imaginative, universal, ancient, and more solidly based in fact and observation than any religion. If God were to have a way to create life, evolution would be a far more amazing and beautiful way to do it than making things instantly appear as they are. Evolution gives living things a history, an ancient and glorious heritage.

The Earth is a greater thing than us. It has been around for 4.5 billion years, and has been teeming with live for 3.5 billion years of that. The Paleozoic era alone is 325 million years long (570 - 245 million years ago), and is even divided into seven smaller periods, each lasting from 30 to 70 million years (thumbnail the image right to view it larger). To really think about and comprehend these numbers bewilders me. Each period in Earth’s history sees further development in living things, with scores of brand new species and scores of extinctions from the previous period. The relatively rapid change that evolution is capable of guarantees a great amount of variation, increasing with time. As Carl Sagan once said, evolution “makes life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”

Using the theory of evolution and comparative anatomy, our picture of hominid evolution is quite complete. The “missing link” is no longer missing. Those claiming a lack of transitional fossils in evolution need only look at our own hominid tree (and other very complete transitions like those of horses, whales, and tetrapods) to see a smooth progression from ape-like species into more human-like species over a period of 6 - 7.8 million years.

(See the full site here)

When we look at nature - at plants, animals, fish - we see beauty. The evidence shows us that all this beauty evolved over time, over billions of years. The overwhelming ancientness of life places us as a very young and fledgling line. After all, the first known civilization of humans was Sumer, dating back to 5400 BC, and only 10,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. These are very small lengths of time compared to even the smallest period in the Paleozoic, a mind-blowing 30 million years. In fact, the entire hominid line has only been around for about 0.2% of the history of life. Humans may be the first life with higher intelligence, but we are demonstrably not the reason for the Earth’s existence.

This fact however does not make our existence meaningless. The same beauty that we see in nature is also present in us: we came about in the same way. We are part of life’s grand story, and we are special in our intelligence, imagination, and drive. To be part of nature, not just an observer of it, is enthralling, fascinating, and, dare I say it, mystifying.

- Evan

The Universe: one big family

This is the story of the universe, according to science:

1) The Beginning: 14 billion years ago, everything in the universe was contained in a single infinitesimally small point. This point, smaller than an atom, had an infinite density and contained all the matter, space, and time of the universe. The point began to rapidly expand, and as the volume of the universe increased, the heat decreased, and atoms were able to form. The first atoms consisted of mostly hydrogen and helium, since these are the lightest, simplest elements. Through the force of gravity, these atoms began to accrete and accumulate in progressively larger and larger clumps.

2) Creation of Elements: Especially large clumps would be stars, which would get so massive that the matter on the inside of them experienced insanely high pressure from gravity. This pressure produced incredible heat, so much heat that the hydrogen and helium atoms were moving fast enough to overcome their repulsion to one another, and began to crash into each other and fuse. Bigger, heavier atoms began to form. Stars that were very high in mass were able to heat their cores enough to create every element up to iron (fusing iron takes more energy than it gives out), and if one of these stars died in a supernova explosion, the massive heat of the explosion was able to create even heavier elements than iron. The dusty, gassy remains of these dead stars were the building material for new solar systems. Our sun and planets formed through the same gravitational accretion process, and each had on it many elements, including those of life: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.

3) Life Stirs: After our planet cooled and formed its huge bodies of water, organic molecules began to form naturally form. There are a few different ideas on how life first began, and none are confirmed, but the following is the most plausible. The first life forms could not have been anything like a cell today; modern cells are far too complex. The first life may have been a single self-replicating molecule, a predecessor to RNA. In the water, there were organic molecules which had one end that was repelled from water and one that was attracted. This led to naturally forming spheres. If self-replicating molecule got caught up in on of these spheres, it would be protected and had a better chance to reproduce. These were the first cells: a self-replicating molecule surrounded by a layer of other molecules.

4) Adaption and Complexity: Single-celled organisms ruled Earth for billions of years. The most dominant form during this time was cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These algae are responsible for putting a significant amount of oxygen on the planet, and the presence of oxygen caused a diversification of life. Some cells could now metabolize oxygen, which was more energy-packed. The first multicellular life was colonial, then some cells in the colonies began specializing in one thing. These were the first organs. To talk of our own evolution in detail would be too lengthy, but it had operated on the same naturally selecting powers as the unicellular life before it. The tree of life (for humans) goes as follows:

Bacteria --> Colonial multicellular --> Polyps --> Fish --> Amphibians --> Reptiles --> Mammals --> Tree-dwellers --> Early hominids --> Humans

5) Our Place: According to science so far, life on Earth is literally one big family. All life today are very distantly related cousins; we are all offspring of previous organisms. However, life itself is made of atoms created in the cores of high-mass stars. So the cosmos, while not alive, are by definition our family, because they gave rise to life. Despite any overtones of silly new-age mysticism, the universe is literally all one. We are part of the universe, not merely observers.

- Evan

Might Makes Right: one Hell of a problem

Let us examine the concept of eternity. It is a concept, and is something that our minds literally cannot grasp. There is a video I have linked on the side of this page ("Hell: an excessive punishment") that has a good analogy for how long eternity is. Imagine a huge planet, made completely of bronze. Every hundred years a bird flies by, brushing its wing against the side of the planet. When the planet is completely worn down to nothing, that will have been the first day of eternity. It is too long a time for us humans to even understand. By God’s own book, no Christian should wish death or pain upon a non-believer, but God chooses to burn and torture people for eternity. Because he is all-powerful and this is his universe, he has the power to pull people out of Hell, or make it disappear completely. But no, he consciously chooses to torture people. Christians are more moral than their own God.

What kind of omniscient, perfectly good being would burn and torture a living thing for any expanse of time? You and I certainly wouldn’t. But God is excused because he is so holy that he is above our morality. This creates a problem: is God good because he has good qualities, or is he good because he’s God? The existence of Hell, accompanied by the millions of people God killed in the Bible, leaves us to assume that God is good because he’s God - he is so far above us that whatever he does goes. This is a dictionary definition of might-makes-right, or a dictator. God obviously does not have the good qualities that his followers insist upon, but rather has such a high position that we are victims to whatever he wants. Does this sound like a supreme, perfect, and good being?

Such a supreme being wants and needs nothing. So what is he doing? Why do we concern him? Why did he come down to this tiny planet on the outskirts of one random galaxy in one corner of the universe and make little miniscule, material creations that have to prove themselves to him? Why is he so offended by these insignificant creatures if they don’t worship him? Why does he want people in Heaven? To have company? These questions are simply unanswerable by Christianity; they don’t know God’s true motives or his actual plan for us. All they know is that they must unquestioningly worship and praise him. They must realize that to someone who is outside of religion, it all seems very strange.

- Evan