Capitalism: A Conservative Christian Religion

Since it is Sunday, I observe …

Evangelical Christians in the U.S. have decried “Godless Communism” and “Godless Socialism” for many, many decades. Some of the most prominent public evangelicals have been more than a little strident on this issue. (Think of Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and especially Billy Graham, etc.)

And while these economic systems, actually political-economic systems, have been excoriated, capitalism has been mentioned only to praise it as something very close to God’s Will. This seems passing strange, no?

I start with definitions of capitalism and free markets.

Definition of Capitalism (Merriam Webster OnLine)
an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

Definition of Free Market (Merriam Webster OnLine)
an economy operating by free competition

Any references to God or Jesus there? No? I do not see any.

Well, what does the Bible have to say about capitalism, which is basically a wealth distribution mechanism, providing a few with a way to get rich and many a way to get poor, a system reeking of winners and losers.

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:24)

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. (James 5: 1-6)

Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. (Luke 12:33)

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5)

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. (1 Timothy 6:10)

Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. (Proverbs 23:4-5)

Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him. (Proverbs 14:31)

I could go on … for page after page, mind you, but I think you get the point.

So, why would these devout evangelical Christians (and many others of similar ilk) stand so stalwartly behind a system, capitalism, that if not severely confined results in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, the ultimate “redistribution” that conservatives rail against? (Actually, they are fine with redistribution in this direction, they just don’t like it when it goes the other way.) My argument is that for a religion to prosper it must serve the interests of the religious and secular elites. Almost by definition the secular elites are defined by their wealth, so unless a religion serves the wealthy, its status declines.

If you look at Evangelical history in the U.S., they have had very little impact (save the occasional savant) until they hitched their wagon to the Republican Party. It was Billy Graham who presidents consulted, not a panel of religious leaders or an interfaith council. Upon Graham’s death, photo after photo showing Graham posing with presidents were to be seen in the epitaphs.

So, Christianity in this country, Protestant Christianity mostly, has favored democracy and capitalism, not because these are favored in scripture (they clearly are not) but because these are favored in the halls of power.

What Would A Christian Economic System Really Look Like?
I wish I could really answer this question. I can but start on an answer. Our economic culture is currently “pay-as-you-go,” if you want something, you must pay for it. Our motto is TANSTAAFL, which if you are not read up on Robert Heinlein, means “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

So, in our culture there is a line we could label “Ability to Pay” that goes from zero to as near to infinity as any of us can conceive of. At the “zero end” there are people who have no job, no housing, no money, no food and live via begging and theft. At the other end we have people who make more than a billion U.S. dollars a year, which as I have indicated before means that if they to work ordinary work hours and take ordinary holidays, they would be “making” $532,000 per hour … for the whole year. That would be to make “just” $1 billion; some make more. To put that in perspective, in my 40 years of work as a teacher, I made $2 million, which these people would make in one afternoon (knocking off early if they wished).

Capitalism does provide incentives for people to work, so there are some of its bones that could be incorporated into the new system, but an economic system that is in accordance with Christianity would have to have both ends of this line truncated.

At the bottom end, everyone would have shelter and food to eat and a reasonable amount of medical care (not to include casting out demons, that would only be included in the Platinum Plans). If people with shelter and enough to eat, couldn’t improve their lot in a fair system (not rigged as our current system is with Right to Work laws and tax breaks for wealthy people, etc.) then that would be their lot in life.

The top end would also need to be truncated, if only to protect rich people from an eternity in Hell (I’m kidding … I think). As incomes reach very high levels, tax brackets need to approach 100%. Now I know this sounds heretical, but I am talking about an economic system that is compatible with Christianity here. Anybody accumulating obscene amounts of money is either doing it legitimately or illegitimately. If they are doing it illegitimately, taxing their socks off is a way to get them to turn away from their illicit behaviors. If they are doing it legitimately, the accumulation of vast wealth is an indicator that they are not taking care of those around them. For example, Walmart could double to wages of its employees and the owners would still make billions in profits every year. Or they could donate those “extra” profits to charities, to avoid very high tax loads, etc.

The additional taxes collected would go to providing the “economic floor” so needed by the poorest among us.

Conservatives should like this system. It would be more “Christian” and with the poor guaranteed a roof over their heads and a full belly and a “fair shake” at improving their lot, if they do not do so, then conservatives would be free to refer to them as being shiftless and lazy.

The additional tax monies acquired through such a system would also allow us to take care of those unable to work: the severely physically handicapped, the mentally ill, wounded warriors, etc. And the rich would still be rich, if they wanted to test the proposition that “Hell is real.”

 

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The Role of Religion in Society in a Nutshell

We’ll offer them religion in exchange for food. If that doesn’t work, we’ll kill them and take their food in the name of religion.
(Cheney cartoon from The New Yorker—April 23, 2018)

The Supernatural: A Con Man’s Special Place

An alarming number of people believe that there is a realm called “the supernatural.” While I suspect people have different definitions for the term, the idea is rather straightforward. Here are dictionary definitions of supernatural and the prefix super-:

Supernatural
1: of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil
2a : departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature
b : attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit)

Super–
1a: over and above : higher in quantity, quality, or degree than : more than

[Source: Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary]

The supernatural realm is always “above” the natural realm, never sideways to it or goodness knows, beneath it. Such a realm basically can’t have a location in the natural realm, so why the insistence on the “above” nature is beyond me. I think this relates to belief in a god which is “up there,” and also another god which is “down there.” The “up” being good and the “down” being bad. Of course, the bad gods and the good gods are in the same supernatural realm, unless there is more than one such realm, but why not? The more the merrier.

I used to hear the phrase “planes of existence” a great deal before the Internet drove us to a more common vocabulary. I think this came about from a pack of cards metaphor as it makes no sense otherwise. Why would one wonder about how realms of existence relate to one another spatially when they shouldn’t be interacting, and so no “fit” is required. Of course, fiction writers, even some of my favorites (Andre Norton was a past favorite), wrote about beings being transferred between these planes of existence via various “gateways.” As a narrative device, this allows the author a great deal of rein to “adjust” foliage, animal life, geology, history, etc. to their whim. But, hey, it is fiction.

All of this was before the “multiverse” became fashionable to talk about in rarified physics circles. The Multiverse was either an invention of Marvel Comics or possibly Jack Vance, maybe Michael Moorcock, I can’t say for sure, but it is now playing a role in cosmological theoretical speculations. I suspect, however, that just as invoking gods to explain the creation of the universe, making things horrifyingly more complicated, that invoking a multiverse to make sense of our one verse will also prove to be vastly complicating and, when that happens it seems to be a sure sign of a dead-end road into a theory.

Currently I consider anyone who mentions anything “supernatural” to be one of two types of people (well, maybe three): an entertainer (Think Ancient Aliens or whatever that show is.), or a con man (most serious religionists are in this category (Think William Lane Craig.). The third possibility is that someone has been, or just is, deluded. If all of your friends and family talk about Disney World as if it were real, you’d think it is, ditto for Heaven and Hell.

Anytime you hear someone talk seriously about the supernatural (beings, locations, occurrences, etc.) grab your wallet and back away briskly. Do not run, you may trip and actually hurt yourself interacting with the only reality for which we have evidence of its existence.

 

Are Theists Stupid?

This question gets asked over and over on questions sites like Quora, along with “Are atheists stupid?” as well as many other permutations of these questions.

The roots of the word “stupid” are related to the word “stupor” in that we all are stupid from time to time as we are “slow on the uptake” or “slow to understand” as if we were in a stupor. But I think this is the wrong word in that it was meant to be a pejorative rather than an accurate descriptive term.

Consider the contestations of a minister in Kentucky: “The placement of the sun and the moon relative to the earth allows life to exist. Is this a mere chance occurrence or by divine design? The existence of gravity which prevents us from floating off into space – is it merely a chance occurrence or is it by divine design?” These questions were not meant to be answered, they were meant as “do you believe the Bible or your lying eyes” challenges. But what sort of evidence might one provide to actually answer these questions?

Let’s start with the latter one. Gravity, which prevents us from floating off into space(!), is this a divine gift or a natural feature? Gravity exists everywhere we can see and there is nowhere we can examine in which it does not. All of the stars whose shapes we can see are spherical which is caused by a force existing that pulls things toward their centers … or … a force that pulls the surface toward a minimal value (aka surface tension). So, water forms drops here on Earth, due to surface tension, not gravity, so can we be sure that it is gravity causing these stars (and their associated planets) to be spherical (or roughly so)? Yes, we can because of the magnitude of the forces involved. We can know from studies of gravity here and in our own solar system (the planets orbits are determined by gravity, not surface tension) that gravity exists and the force is determined by the quantities of masses involved and their distance of separation. Surface tension is not such a large force so it cannot explain the spherical shapes of all of the stars and planets within our ken and, of course, explains nothing about orbits.

Astronaut Joseph Kerwin, aboard Skylab 2 in 1973, forms a perfect sphere of water by blowing droplets from a straw. Gravity is countered in orbit, but not surface tension. Photo courtesy of NASA.

So, is gravity a natural feature or was it supplied as a magical gift to humanity? The only way to settle such disputes is to use a principle called Occam’s Razor which states that when you have two competing hypotheses or theories, the one which has the fewer causes is most likely to be correct. So, on one hand we have “gravity is a feature of mass: it attracts itself.” On the other hand we have “an unknowable supernatural being who has unlimited powers to do anything it wants. We do not know where this entity came from or what its motivations are, but it created gravity in an unknown process to that we could live on this planet and not spin off into space.” Which do you think is simpler and therefore more likely?

The first question “The placement of the sun and the moon relative to the earth allows life to exist. Is this a mere chance occurrence or by divine design?” We have exactly one example of this phenomenon: namely the Earth. There are other planets in our solar system that are too close to the sun and are presumably to hot or too far from the sun and are presumably too cold for life such as we know to exist … but we have not checked these other planets to see if life exists there. We have explored Mars to some extent and have not definitively found signs of life yet, but that planet is large and our rovers are small so that “experiment” is incomplete. So, we have a suggestion of an hypothesis (for the existence of the so-called Goldilocks Zone), a conjecture, but no substantive criticism of that conjecture per se. So, is our planet’s place next to its star an accident or a sign of divine placement? To answer this question, we need to examine a great many other solar systems, ones with planets in the Goldilocks Zone, and see if there is life on them. If there is, we still haven’t answered the question as a deity that “designed” our systems could have made the designs generic, which means we would find them everywhere.

Once again, the question comes down to an Occam’s Razor decision. This one is somewhat distorted by our uniqueness (in our own knowledge). We are the only highly intelligent species of which we are aware. The conditions that exist here and now support the existence of intelligent life because if they did not, we would not be here to ask this question. So, were they divinely provided or naturally occurring. Occam’s Razor says natural, not divinely engineered.

The problem we have here is one of perspective. On one hand we have a cadre of people trying to find answers to fundamental questions of our existence; they are called scientists. On the other hand, we have a group of people who say they know the answers to those questions and have for a very long time, well before studies of gravity, planetary orbits, evolution existed. Their claim is this: Whoa, Nature is so complicated I can’t understand it, so I assume that it must have been made but something which has much greater powers than I have. The feeling behind this is real. I feel it, as a scientist. I am a chemist and I understand some of the chemical behaviors involved in this quest for knowledge. But I also know that even as a “chemistry expert” my knowledge is limited. When I taught advanced chemistry classes, I used to draw a number line on the blackboard, the longest straight line I could draw. I said that the length of the line represented the amount of chemical knowledge known to us collectively. Right near the “zero” end of the line I would make a hash mark and say “this is your level of knowledge.” I would then shift my body to a place nearer the other end, but then reach back and draw another hash mark just a tiny bit farther away from zero and say “This represents my knowledge of chemistry.” And that was the honest truth. No one chemist knows even a single percent of all of the chemical knowledge possessed by humans collectively. This reality, that the scope of human knowledge is well beyond the capacity of any single person, allows me to have respect for the collective knowledge we have of other fields. For example, the amount of evidence we have supporting the Theory of Evolution in biology is possibly exceeded only by the amount of evidence we have in chemistry and physics for the Atomic Theory. The amount of evidence is vast and when biologists say “it is conclusive,” they are not saying that the Theory of Evolution is “proved” or any other such nonsense, they are basically saying that the chance of making a mistake assuming that this is the way the universe works is very, very … very … small.

And as these understandings of how the universe works grow the “mysteries” needing a god to explain them grow smaller and smaller, and smaller. The problem is just that non-scientists rarely get a glimpse at how vast our scientific knowledge is. Couple that with an unwillingness to entertain the possibility their theology might be wrong, prevents even them from making simple searches for evidence that might disprove their Theory of Divine Intervention.

Since the Theory of Divine Intervention has no evidence whatsoever, merely rhetorical arguments, e.g. “How could something as complicated as an eye have evolved?” it is destined to lose every contest with secular knowledge, especially when they persist in asking questions like “How could something as complicated as an eye have evolved?” and ‘Where are the transitional fossils?” because these questions have been answered quite some time ago. There are evidence trails indicating the evolution of eyes in multiple locations and times, meaning it didn’t just evolve once, so it could not be as difficult to do, only difficult to conceive of if you do not serious entertain the answers to the questions asked. And Wikipedia maintains a “tentative, partial” list of transitional fossils (here) because the list, although quite long already, keeps growing.

So, to answer the question in the title, I think “not,” merely willfully ignorant.

Addendum I deftly ignored the “placement of the moon” issue here. Basically the moon stabilizes the rotation of the Earth, preventing frequent flips of the axis the Earth rotates on which would be very disruptive for living organisms. (Imagine that as we are entering spring right now, if the poles were to be reversed we would be entering autumn, just as Australia is now; with no spring or summer crops to sustain out food supplies.) The rejoinder is why would an unlimited deity create such Rube Goldbergian system when a much simpler system could be created by magic. (Some theists retort that their deity cannot do things that are impossible, which I contend is a slippery slope because creating a universe via magic would be on that list of impossible things I would think.)

Evangelicals Denounce Godless Capitalism!

In a stunning reversal, the Evangelical Council of American Churches has denounced capitalism as a godless pursuit of money and power. Their statement pointed out that politicians deference to religion in general is just posturing as few of them lead lives that have Christian foundations. Instead the politicians are paid handsomely to support capitalistic practices that advantage the rich and disadvantage the poor. “Jesus said that the poor will always be among us, but that doesn’t mean that they should be treated like dirt,” the announcement stated.

Capitalism was attacked as having no soul, being a giant edifice to greed. “Only a change of heart,” it was claimed, “could preserve the economic system, one which would imbue more Christian virtues into the system. There needs to be considerations given to the relief of human suffering and not just shareholder value,” the document went on.

* * *

Yeah, in your dreams.

I was wondering why these churches were against godless communism and yet were pro (pro-, pro-) capitalism which has no whiff of god about it. Then I realized … tax breaks!

 

 

 

Stepping Back To See

I enjoy the blog Tim…Stepping Out where the mythos of the New Testament is being explored (to become a book, it is promised).

In that blog I read all kinds of things and while that blog gets into the mythical underpinnings of various scriptures, I am now tending to take a step back instead. For example: Jesus gathers 12 disciples to follow him and help on his mission. The first gospel, Mark, paints these disciples as hopelessly dense rubes. I suspect if you asked the average Christian what they thought of Jesus’s disciples, most would either agree with that sentiment, or just stare at you blankly.

Of the twelve, Judas didn’t turn out so well, even though without him, there is no Christianity. But of the others, did any of them have significant impact on the development of what we know as Christianity today? The answer is a simple “no.” Maybe Peter had a little impact, but that impact was buried under the impact of the “Apostle” Paul, who was not a disciple. (I put apostle in quotes as it was a designation that Paul gave himself; it was not bestowed by any authority.)

Now Jesus is consider to be “God” himself, the all-knowing, etc., etc. creator of the universe. How could such a being have chosen so many ill-suited people to carry his message, especially when he had tens of thousands of angels at his command who would, I suspect, make a much greater impression upon people hearing the message? How could Jesus, god of the universe, be so incredibly inept at team building? Apparently none of his disciples could write, as they left no testaments to their experience. (Plenty of people claiming to be them wrote things, but those have been dated to times in which all of the disciples would have been dead, so they are forgeries.) Neither did anyone else think it was a good idea to pay a scribe to write down things these people said.

In another narrative, Simon of Cyrene, the character selected from the crowd to carry Jesus’s cross, was selected somehow to receive the Christ Spirit from Jesus, so that Jesus could die on the cross (niftily explaining away the criticism that Jesus, as a god, cannot die and so could only fake dying for the rubes in the audience). Not many Christians accept this narrative around Simon of Cyrene, but if you take it at face value, Jesus is being treated as a meat puppet by the Holy Spirit and when the going gets tough, Jesus the man, is left all by his lonesome to bear the “discomfort” of crucifiction. Hey, way to treat your loyal servants!

If we take a step back from, instead of into, the details, we see the utter unsupportability of these stories. There is no real “there” there. These stories are just stories and they do not make a narrative case for the claims of modern Christianity. Their god does not act like a god which is all-powerful, and on the rare case he does, he acts like the cosmos’s biggest dick.

The Pull of Religious Community

On Quora yesterday the question was asked why Christianity has become the #1 religion in all of the world. My response was that “Christianity” was imaginary. There are tens of thousands of different sects of Christianity, each so defined because they couldn’t find enough common ground to join one of the pre-existing sects. Some of these sects are vehemently opposed to some of the others, to the extent that they do not believe some of the others are Christians at all. If you listed the population of each of these sects individually, few of them would make the top ten list in the world.

This question came close on the heels of my finishing of the book, Sapiens. One of the points made near the end of that book was that the idea of an individual was developed quite recently. Harari claims that the individual was an invention of “governments and markets.” Here he was painting with broad strokes, so don’t think of individual markets but markets as a local and global phenomenon.

You do not have to go back too far to a time in which an individual had almost no chance of surviving without their family. The family provided shelter and food and education. If something was desired that the immediate family could not handle, extended family was brought in, e.g. uncles and cousins would help raise a barn or other building. No pay was provided or expected. If even larger projects were involved, e.g. a large ditch to bring in water from a lake or river, the local community banded together. The key thing was that everyone knew each other and had information as to whether others could be trusted. These values correspond almost exactly to “small town values” even to this day.

There was no government to appeal to, no institutions, like banks, from which to get resources. And this covered almost all of the “civilized” period of humanity, at least until quite recently.

Then governments based upon laws were created and institutions sprung up that provided what families used to provide. The “markets” provided jobs so that we were no longer beholden to family entirely. Banks provided loans to buy houses and start businesses. Police forces and courts provided justice in place of relatives making visits to malcontents with axe handles in hand.

People still talk about times in which they could leave their houses with the doors unlocked in their small town. This, of course, was due to the fact that these small towns were generally agricultural and spread out over quite some acreage. The odds on some stranger walking by your house was close to zero, and the perceived safety was not some moral superiority of their community being enacted, just a manifestation of isolation.

But people still yearn for “community.” We are social animals after all. One institution that provides a link from now to “back then” is the churches. Back then, the churches were part of the intimate community in that everyone who went to a church knew all of the others. So, churches didn’t create community, they were just a manifestation of the community. Today, churches offer community and Community. They offer a community of like minded believers in whatever. Many of the churches, the smaller ones, become intimate in that everyone in the church knows all of the others (fairly well). Lots of the others, especially the mega-churches, are creating imaginary Communities. These institutions talk of “belonging to something bigger.” They spin this to immense proportions when they talk about their religion expanding to cover the entire globe. And, of course, they connect this “belong to something bigger” to include their supernatural entities as well.

Some point to this “ability” of churches, that is to create community/Community, as an indicator of why they will be with us forever. Of that, I am dubious. Humanity creates communities at a bewildering pace. My favorite example is that there is an Association of Playing Card Manufacturers Association Executives. Churches are just what we have been handed down to perform a certain community practice. That this practice can be “played” to include abortions like prosperity gospels or atheist’s churches, shows that there is nothing behind it but inertia (tradition is just a way of saying “we have always done it this way”).

“Christianity” is an imaginary Community including groups of people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room at the same time. Most of the individuals in this community only know their own experience in their intimate community of their local church. This is conflated to include the imaginary group to the extent that when someone criticizes the idiocy of, say, the Biblical Literalists, others declare it to be a War on Christianity.

It has been often said by atheists that if we could only get Christians to read the Bible, half of them would drop out of their religion before they finished reading it. Maybe we need to educate Christians as to their own imaginary community’s history. How the Ebionites, for example, a sect whose beliefs are closer to the teaching of Jesus than any of the others has been declared a heretical cult by orthodox Christianity.

The cracks are already there in the giant edifice of the Christian Imaginary Community. Even small wedges should do the job of breaking it up.

The U.S. Constitution is Based Upon Christian Principles … Really, Again? Still?

 

President Trump is beloved by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians because he uses their methods (aka “He understands us.”). The prime method they share is to state propaganda points over and over to the point that everyone accepts them as being the case, if not being true.

One such claim is that the U.S. government is built upon Christian principles. I was tempted to call this a lie, but for it to be a lie the people making the claim need to understand that it is false and state it any way. It is possible they haven’t reasonned it through, because, well, reason is not their long suit. It is none the less untrue, false, wrong.

Some start by claiming the Constituion is based upon the Ten Commandments or at least incorporates them. Let’s look at that. Here, in short form they are …

The Ten Commandments

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
   2. You shall not make idols.
   3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
   4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
   5. Honor your father and your mother.
   6. You shall not murder.
   7. You shall not commit adultery.
   8. You shall not steal.
   9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
   10. You shall not covet.

And here is their relation to the Constitution:

1. Not addressed. In fact, God is not mentioned in the Constitution. And the First Amendment to the Constitution strictly forbids the U.S. Government from creating or sponsoring a religion or forbidding any religious practice of any kind. (The states can, however.)
   2. Not mentioned.
   3. Not mentioned.
   4. Not mentioned.
   5. Not mentioned.
   6. Not mentioned.
   7. Not mentioned.
   8. Not mentioned.
   9. Not mentioned. Perjury is illegal in most senses, otherwise the legal system would fall apart, but it is not part of our federal government structure.
   10. Actually, the assumed economic system, capitalism, is based upon coveting things, so this is 100% assbackward.

Okay, here’s the Consitution, again in short.

Preamble
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure … etc.

Article 1
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article 2
Clause 1. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen …

Article 3
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the suprem…

Article 4
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which suc…

Article 5
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several Stat…

Article 6
Section 1. All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

Article 7
The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

Amendments
The Bill of Rights may well be the most celebrated part of the Constitution of the United States, the home to long-cherished guarantees of Americans’ most fundamental rights and freedoms. Here they are (in short):

1. Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.
   2. Right to keep and bear arms in order to maintain a well regulated militia.
   3. No quartering of soldiers.
   4. Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
   5. Right to due process of law, freedom from self-incrimination, double jeopardy.
   6. Rights of accused persons, e.g., right to a speedy and public trial.
   7. Right of trial by jury in civil cases.
   8. Freedom from excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishments.
   9. Other rights of the people.
   10. Powers reserved to the states.

Anything even remotely Christian there? Nope. Christianity claims that the only proper form of government is a theocracy, in which their god calls all of the shots. God makes and enforces all of the rules (often through others). The religious elites decide who gets to speak for god (the Catholics do this when they elect a Pope, but the common people do not get a vote). So, no voting, no courts, no three branches of government, none of that is in the Christian Bible. The Bible does not and would not approve of democracy: represenative, direct, or otherwise.

So, where is this influence?

Many say that the framers were all Christians, so they had to include Christian principles if for no other reason it was woven into their psyches. I guess we need to be thankful that all of the framers, or most, weren’t poker or whist players. Can you imagine the whist influence on the Constitution?

Conclusion
Since many, if not most, of the framers were deists, we can accept that they were “god believers,” although their definition of “god” may be at variance with that of today’s believers. Since they were all god believers, then if the logic of this argument holds, we should see god in the Constitution. Do you see any god in the Constitution? I do not.

Consequently this claim (“the U.S. government is built upon Christian principles”) is, in effect, a big lie, one told over and over often enough that a great many people believe it. Call it a big untruth if you will, it just ain’t so.

Avoiding the Narrative Trap

I keep seeing people on the Internet arguing fine points regarding the Christian narratives surrounding the Garden of Eden, the Exodus, the Resurrection of Jesus, or Noah’s Ark. Too often it seems to me that people limit themselves to critiquing the fine points of the narrative offered. With regard to Noah’s Ark people ask: how such a small group of men make such a large ship? How could so many animals fit into such a small space? Where did they store the animal’s food? How did they shovel out all of the shit produced? Were there dinosaurs on the Ark? If one steps back from the narrative and looks at it from afar, one asks quite different questions.

Yahweh is apparently disappointed in his creations. He declared them “good” but now has decided to kill them all and start over. This seems more than a little like admitting a mistake that should have been foreseen, but even if you set that aside, there are fundamental criticisms of the entire episode. The killing is done is an extremely clumsy way. Not only does Yahweh take out all of the human beings (save the eight that end up on the Ark), but he kills off 99.99% of all of the animals, even the sea creatures are done in (the large addition of fresh water to the salty seas will kill most fish/creatures adapted to the salty water). What have these creatures done to be killed like this? Even animals in the Ark are destined to be dead before long as they were adapted to, say very cold temperatures (penguins, etc.) and they are released from the Ark on a mountaintop in the Middle East with orders to go forth and multiply, what? Of course, Yahweh could transport them back to whence they came but why have all of these details to deal with?

A supernatural entity with the powers attributed to Yahweh (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence) could do something like make all but the eight disappear such that they were never there in the first place. No big flood, just Noah and his family wandering around in a world empty of other humans wondering where’d they go and really, truly believing in the power of their god. No totally improbably clumsy event, just the act of an effing powerful god.

The Garden of Eden narrative is likewise daffy. Yahweh creates Adam to what end? In Genesis 1 the reason was “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (In Genesis 2, the reason is different. It starts by saying that there was no shrub or plant on Earth but Yahweh had planted a garden (again with the contradictions).) Going with the Genesis 1 narrative, Yahweh basically is creating an overseer for his garden. Obviously, wild creatures have no use of rulers, kings, queens, etc. On what basis does an all-powerful entity need a helper, a gardener? Admitting the need for help from other hands at all is admitting that one is not all-powerful. The same can be said about the tens of thousands of angels at his command. Why? What could they do that he could not?

If you step out of the narrative, you end up with questions like: “Why didn’t Yahweh want Adam and Eve to know the difference between good and evil? If Adam and Eve had been less adventurous, would all of us now be ignorant of the difference between good and evil? And that would make us better exactly how? Also, he created the two of them. Could he not foresee that they might misunderstand or be confused or be misled by a serpent he put in his garden? If these damned trees were so important, why did he not post guards around them as he did after he kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden?

The entire narrative is so full of holes as to be childish. And this is the event for which thousands and thousands of generations of human beings are being held to account and will be burned in Hell for not making it right. Talk about a scam.

With regard to the resurrection of Jesus, which is absolutely critical to the existence of Christianity, if you ignore the details and take a step back, again Yahweh is performing his miracles in an incredibly clumsy way, not using his transcendent powers with any finesse whatsoever. First Yahweh forbids human sacrifice, then when he is trying to figure out how to absolve humans of Original Sin, he says “Hey, Murray, I’ve got an idea. I’ll use a human sacrifice. You know how powerful blood magic is. Hey, it should work.” WTF? An all-powerful being could have made Original Sin go away in such a way that no one would remember it had ever existed. Or he could have set an expiration date on it retroactively (unto the seventh generation …) so it would have expired far in the past. Then he could have established a new covenant if that was his intent. Why this clumsy puppet show? The guy had tens of thousands of angels, one for every couple of hundred humans on the entire planet. Imagine all of them fluttering down from high above with a message. When they left they could have dropped leaflets, like we do in war times, with a summary of the new covenant. Now that would have made an impression … and left an account with every man Jack of us.

Basically, after the initial creation verse of the Bible, Yahweh never acts like an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent god at all.

How can a god which can create a man from dust require their savior to be born of a woman and wait 30 years to deliver a message that an angel could deliver more effectively? Is this god-like?

Why does a god who creates the entire universe make 99.9999% of it out of reach of mankind, so that neither it nor they can have any affect on the other whatsoever? Is this intelligent design or goofy design?

I suggest that atheists have to stop attacking religious scriptures on their narratives fine points because we end up just writing critical reviews of the Goat-Herder’s Guide to the Universe. I suggest that we ask more profound questions, such as “why did a self-contained, perfect god create us in the first place?” The only answer I have heard is that when we go to heaven, we sit at god’s feet singing his praises, so my best guess is that this god needed worshipers, which is just sick. This also makes me wonder if all of the gods have their own mega-network and status on that network is gained by the number of “Likes” recorded. Imagine that a giant Mark Zuckerberg created this universe …

Why Three, Christians?

The Holy Trinity was discussed, argued, and fought over (yes, with swords and clubs and mobs and riots), but wasn’t settled dogma until … well, it still isn’t.

The Holy Trinity is the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” (Yahweh, Jesus, and Casper?) that forms the monotheistic god of the Christians. The concept that the three are one is still more than a bit inaccessible but I will leave that at the moment and ask the more fundamental question: why three aspects of the god of Christianity? I suspect this came about when the campaign (yes, it was a campaign) to get Jesus declared to be God as opposed to being an angel, a prophet, or some other supernatural being was just getting started. Since Yahweh was already “the one true god,” Jesus couldn’t also be the one and only, unless he an old Yahweh were one and the same. Ta da! (This has to be more than a bit embarrassing because Jesus referred to Yahweh often as “the father” and himself as “the son” as two distinct people … repeatedly in scripture. I guess it just adds to the mystery.) In any case, unification was necessary to politically bring all of the Christians together (to better serve the political states that were using state power to implement Christianity). Realize that they weren’t just depending on ordinary people to believe what they were told, they told people what to believe in rather “believe this or get out” statements. And there was also a sizable fraction who thought that their god was an ethereal spirit, so they had to gather in the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, to be able to claim they represented all of the Christians (the real Christians, that was).

But is not the Christian god all-powerful? Could he not appear in any guise he desired? Did not Moses have a conversation with a burning bush who then gave him commandments? So, why isn’t it the Holy Four, “the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Burning Bush?” And didn’t Yahweh visit a few characters in Genesis and wrestle with them? So, shouldn’t we have the Fab Five: “the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Burning Bush, and Mysterious Wrestler?”

Enquiring minds want to know.

This is just one of a myriad questions/talking points that go unaddressed because we take the existing story lines of scripture far too literally. If we stop and think a bit, we would have to ask a great many different questions … such as (You knew that was coming, no?):

1. Why would a god who can create a fully grown adult human male out of mud, have himself born from a woman and live 30 years in a desolate, uninteresting place to begin a mission to absolve people of their sins? Can you imagine waiting around for 30 years pretending to be taught the Torah, carpentry, and which hand to eat with, etc? And how many times did Jesus have to defecate to truly understand what that was like? Did he learn to masturbate to get the full human experience?
2. Why would an all-powerful god need helpers? All of those tens of thousands of angels running errands, mopping floors, why?
3. Why would a totally self-sufficient god create a race of intelligent beings for the sole purpose of worshipping him?
4. Why would an all-powerful god pick an obscure people living in an obscure place to share a message to deliver to the rest of the world? This god has tens of thousands of angels; could not they have delivered the message much more efficiently?
5. Why would a god fine tune an entire fucking universe, and then concentrate the “special life” (us) on just one little planet in one little galaxy, from among hundreds of billions of galaxies? If this is a “fine tuned for life universe,” shouldn’t we be up to our asses in aliens?

Like I said, enquiring minds want to know.

The Easter holiday must have brought out the atheistic team spirit in this blog!