Religious Autobiography 1998-2002




















Religious Autobiography 1980-1998




Can a church building have a kitchen?
Is Sunday school allowed?
Should churches send money to missionary and benevolent organizations?
Is it ok to have a paid preacher?











Part 2: Religious Autobiography 1998-2002

Fighting the army

Fighting the Army - PBS NOW

If you're looking for ways to cut military spending, denying disability benefits to veterans with PTSD is not a good way to do it. This story follows two soldiers who fought bravely and were damaged by what they experienced in the war. The army mishandled their treatment and found excuses to kick them out and strip them of their benefits. This is a 24 minute program and you can watch video, download an mp3 or read the transcript. I urge everyone to take a look at this. How we treat these young men and women says a lot about who we are as Americans and as humans.

Who's worse, Hitler or God?

Hitler and God, BFF

It's hard to imagine anyone who is more evil than Adolf Hitler. But think for a minute about why we consider him to be so bad. The worst things he did were also done or commanded by the God of the Old Testament. I should clarify that I think that Yahweh does not actually exist outside of the imagination, so this list is an evaluation of the Biblical concept of God and a condemnation of the ancient tribe who reportedly did these evil things while claiming that their god commanded them. I hope it will cause modern Christians think twice about saying that the God of the Bible is a loving and perfectly moral being.

Evil stuff Hitler Yahweh
Advocated racial purity
Seized land that belonged to other nations
Executed homosexuals
Cruel medical and genetic experiments
Tortures people even after they're dead

(Click on the checkmarks to see relevant evidence.)

Before you rise to the defense of Yahweh, please consider this statement:

To devote one's moral reflections to constructing elaborate rationales for past genocides, human sacrifices, and the like is to invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions.

-Elizabeth Anderson (The Portable Atheist, 340)

Another view on slavery and the Bible

When I discussed slavery and the Bible a few weeks ago, I tried to deal with the various responses that I might hear from people who believe that the Bible is inerrant. Apparently there was one that I didn't think of, but I heard it today. I was talking with someone who believes that most of the Bible is the inspired word of God and I asked him what he thinks about the passages that condoned slavery. He said that he didn't see anything wrong with slavery because the Bible doesn't condemn it. I pressed him on this to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. He confirmed that he sees nothing inherently wrong with owning another human, punishing him or her with beatings and using them for forced labor. He said that he is not racist and that he doesn't want to be a slave or own a slave now, but if the legality of slavery was put to a vote, he wouldn't bother to go to the polls to vote for or against it.

Plus one point for being consistent with his belief that the Bible is God's word. Minus one million points for moral reprehensibility.

Dean Kamen's work on prosthetics


(via Signal vs Noise)

Good quote

I came across a quote that pretty well sums up my current view of religion:


Which is very similar to

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. - Carl Sagan

So, if people want to accept an idea that has no proof behind it, fine, that's their right. But if they ask me why I don't accept it, I feel no obligation to attempt to disprove their idea. The burden of proof is on the person asserting something. I don't assert that there is no god, but I live my life without a belief in god. If you want to assert something with no proof, feel free, but don't expect me to take your belief seriously. I am just as likely to dismiss your belief as your are to dismiss someone's belief in fairies, astrology or unicorns. Perhaps that seems disrespectful. Why does religion deserve more respect than any other unproven idea?

To be fair, if I assert something without proof (as I'm sure do), I don't think I have a right to expect my ideas to be respected and taken seriously, either. They can be and often are dismissed. It's fun to discuss unproven ideas, but anyone asserting an unproven idea should remember that the burden of proof is on them.

Buy a car, get a free gun

US car dealer in free gun offer - That dealership is in Butler, MO, 10 miles south of here.

My garden digger

Four nights ago my garden was dug up. I looked at it in the morning and all the seeds I had planted were mixed up and it was clear that a dog had been digging in my garden. It was probably looking for one of the many moles that roams my yard. I smoothed the dirt back out, but didn't replant anything. The next night it was dug up again. And the next night. So, I borrowed an outdoor light from my dad, set up my video camera in the window and installed some motion-sensor/recording software on Sara's MacBook (EvoCam). Once I found out which of the neighborhood dogs was destroying my work, I would be able to print off a picture and take it to the owner to ask that they keep their dog out of my yard. Well, my setup worked, but the culprit was not what I expected:


That looks like a fox to me. I live in the middle of a town of about 2,000. I've seen a fox wandering the streets in the last year, but I never was able to catch it on film. Now the mystery is solved, but I don't know what I can do about it. I wonder if the local animal control office has an email address.

Is God Imaginary?

God Is Imaginary is a site that offers 50 simple proofs that the Christian God is not real. The articles are good and should give any Christian plenty to think about, but I'm not sure how I feel about their use of the word "proof." I think that many varieties of Christian faith today have been winnowed down over the years so that they're almost impossible to disprove.

Early on in the Christian myth God is someone who can walk, talk and wrestle with a human. Then he withdrew to Heaven, that place up in the sky. The story has Jesus going to Heaven by way of the clouds and promising to return by the same path. We've taken rockets beyond the clouds and the atmosphere and we don't see a gold-plated kingdom floating up there. We see only the vacuum of space. But now God and Heaven have moved to "another dimension" or "outside of space and time."

Another example of this can be found in prayer. The stories say that humans used to talk directly to God and he talked back. Then he only communicated through prophets. Early in the Christian era (and among some denominations today) it was thought that any believer could do miracles and expect answers to prayers. But today, most liberal Christians admit that they don't expect prayers to be answered as the Bible promises. Or, if they refuse to admit that, then they're quick to excuse God for not giving them what they ask for. Some go so far as to downplay prayers that ask for something in favor of seeing prayer as an act that conveys a spiritual benefit to the person praying. Early Christians and modern fundamentalists would see this as a very weak and non-Biblical view of prayer.

So, in my opinion, today's Christians can choose to divorce themselves from historical Christianity or they can divorce themselves from reality.

Prayer is something that can be tested. The Bible promises that prayers will be answered.

- Mark 11:24

- John 14:14

Yet study after study has shown that prayer has no supernatural effect. When you pray for something, it's no more likely to happen than if you didn't pray. Many Christians, aware of this fact, are careful to not pray for anything unless there's a decent chance that it will happen anyway. When it does, they rejoice in the power of prayer. When it doesn't, well, that was just God's will.

This video makes the case that prayer is just another superstition:


But what about liberal Christians who admit that the passages I quoted above are not inerrant or at the very least don't mean what they seem to mean? Perhaps they value intercessory prayer for the calming effect it has on all involved and the social connections that it creates. Knowing that others are thinking about you and praying for you can have a real subconscious effect on a person. Studies on the efficacy of prayer have to control for these factors by making sure that patients don't know whether they're being prayed for or not. Why would we want to spoil the effect by pointing out that prayer actually has no supernatural effect? Preventing stories like this one is one reason. And I think we can get all the social and psychological benefits of prayer using completely rational methods.

If you're a believer, then what convinces you that God is not imaginary? Is your belief subject to falsification? If so, what evidence would prove to you that God is not real? If not, then can you claim that your beliefs are any more rational than Islam, FSM or Scientology?

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