Little Things Can Make An Atheist

.Atheist

Little Things Can Make An Atheist
12/18/2016 02:37 am ET | Updated Dec 18, 2016
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J. H. McKenna, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer, History of Religious Ideas, University of CA Irvine
As I read deeper in the literature of unbelief and ‘freethought’ from the past three centuries, it is interesting to see ‘Little Things’ given as reasons for rejecting Christianity and God.

Here’s a sampling that I have paraphrased from multiple authors living a hundred to three hundred years ago:

•        If God ‘reveals’ vital information to only a few people and keeps that information concealed from the wide world, this shows an unjust partiality in God. If God had a saving message for humanity, why didn’t God make the message accessible to all at the same moment?

•        No information can be called ‘revealed’ that was not formerly ‘concealed.’ But purportedly revealed information was already extant in the world for hundreds or thousands of years and found all over the globe. Moses’ moral commands were in no way a ‘revelation’ inasmuch as every tribe on the planet had arrived at these rules millennia earlier.

•        If God really spoke to the world, the world would be in convinced agreement about it. But what we hear is a cacophony of discordant voices from innumerable religious sects. The very disagreements discredit them all. All of them are correct in their accusations against each other, and all of them are wrong in their own claims.

•        To say that God has ‘mercy’ on humanity can only mean that God’s laws are either defectively harsh to begin with and require mercy to moderate them, or that God is defectively lenient in not applying his original punishments for infractions to his just laws. Either way, ‘mercy’ indicates defect.

•        Jesus as a ‘son of God’ is just as suspect as all other ancient ‘sons of God’ whose mothers were impregnated by a God. This was common in the era Christianity arose in, and Christianity simply adopted the god-man motif.

•        It slanders God to say God could think of no other way to satisfy his irritated sense of justice than to execute his own innocent son. Any human father would be hanged for such a scheme.

•        No system of jurisprudence can accept the innocent for the guilty, and so the substitutionary death of Jesus is not a moral idea. It is an idea based on pecuniary justice, of paying off a monetary fine for another person, which is permissible; but going to the gallows for another person is nowhere accepted.

•        If Jesus came to earth in order ‘to suffer’ for our sins, then he should have lived a very long time: he should have endured a crippling, decades-long disease; he should have seen his own children predecease him and his wife; he should have contracted dementia to debilitate and hobble his old age; he should have died in mental and physical anguish at age 93, not age 33. As it was, Jesus died in his prime after suffering for three hours on a Friday afternoon, and then he hurried back to the paradise from which he came. Many millions of people have suffered more than Jesus did. And many millions would undertake to die in their prime if they knew they could come back to life three days later to report on the afterlife.

•        If Jesus’s purpose was ‘to die’ for humanity, it would have made no difference how he died. He could have died of smallpox or a fever or from slipping on ice.

•        It took only six days for God to make the universe, but God could not save humanity all at once in a week? Thousands of years preceded Jesus and thousands of years have followed Jesus—and still most people have not been saved.

•        If Jesus had intended to start a new religious system he would have written it down himself during his lifetime, like dozens of previous Jewish prophets. But Jesus wrote nothing.

•        Jesus is depicted in the gospels as disrespecting his mother when he was twelve and again as a grown man.

•        Jesus did not practice his own rule: he did not love his enemies but berated them with an unwarranted bitterness.

•        An eternal tormenting punishment without rehabilitation for the offenders is perhaps the most immoral idea anyone ever conjured. And yet Jesus preached hell. It would be better for all of us to be eternally annihilated than for one child to writhe forever in hell.

•        Since most people who ever lived have never been Christians, most people are going to hell—and thus the devil wins the cosmic battle.

•        God must have known millions of years before he created humanity that the vast majority of the humans would end up in the everlasting and hopeless misery of hell, even with his ‘plan’ of salvation.

•        A plan of salvation that manages to save only a tiny fraction of the human race is not a ‘successful’ rescue plan.

•        Many discrepancies between the gospels cannot be reconciled, as for instance their distinct stories of Jesus’s resurrection. Who all went to the tomb? How many angels were there? What were the angels doing? Who saw Jesus first? When did Jesus first appear to his disciples? Where did Jesus first appear to his disciples? Where did Jesus ascend into heaven? All the information is different in the four gospels.

•        And what happened to all those people who rose from their graves when Jesus rose from his grave? Did they return to their former occupations and to their former (and remarried) husbands and wives? How is it that no one got their names and their stories?

•        Joseph was deflected from jealousy because Mary convinced him a ghost impregnated her?

•        Why are Judas and Pilate not counted as saints since they were the direct cause of Jesus’s saving death? Why are there no statues of Judas and Pilate?

•        Upon close inspection, none of the purported ‘prophecies’ predicting aspects of Jesus’s life in the Old Testament have anything to do with Jesus in the original Old Testament passages.

•        Christianity says there was a war in heaven between the angels of Satan and the angels of Michael. A ‘war’ between supernatural beings who cannot be injured or bleed?

•        If angels in heaven could sin, as Satan and his rebel angels did, what guarantee do we have that humans won’t sin after they arrive in heaven? Or, if saved humans in heaven will not be able to sin, couldn’t God have made such impeccable humans on earth to begin with?

•        The heavenly Father is like an earthy father who continually watches over his toddler children and allows them to handle sharp knives and then blames them and not himself when they cut themselves and each other.

•        When a miracle is advanced as proof of the soundness of a religion, this says the religion cannot be believed as a matter of normal persuasion.

•        Geography is fate where religion is concerned. Almost no one chooses a religion but merely absorbs the local religion on offer in a geographic area at a given moment in history. As such, most people who have ever lived have never been Christians and the message of Christianity never reached them.

•        Without indoctrinating children, few people would have religion. Children are not ‘born believers’ anywhere.

•        The question ‘Who gave you a conscience?’ means about as much as ‘Who gave you a nose?’ The answer to both is ‘nature.’ A dog and a cat have a conscience, as does a monkey, and even some birds. These animals know when they have done wrong and feel guilt and demonstrate guilt when caught. A ‘conscience’ is no proof of a God.

•        Theists have fought fellow theists to the death for thousands of years. And yet it is inconceivable that an army of chemists should kill botanists, or that astronomers should kill geologists.

•        Unbelief is a false crime, and belief is not meritorious. God can neither be injured by the one nor boosted by the other.

•        The Psalmist who said ‘Only a fool says in his heart there is no God’ meant that ‘Only a fool is afraid to announce his unbelief to the wide world and keep it a secret in his heart.’

uponreligion.com

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