Answers for Amber on Why I Quit Christianity

By R. A. McGough | Published: May 17, 2013

Amber asked these questions in the comment stream under my post Explaining Myself where I had answered some questions relating to my Why I Quit Christianity.

Hi Mr. Richard,

First I just want to say thank you so much for the great work of the bible wheel and site, I’m hoping I’ll be able to buy the book soon.

So I’ve been reading up on some of the posts about why you “quit Christianity” and I guess I had a couple of questions to start.

Do you believe God is real? a Supreme Being that had the intelligence and power to create the natural universe as we know it right now?

I guess I’m confused because you seem to use the scriptures a lot, so are you still reading the bible, for you to know God better?

And do you still believe that Jesus is the bridge to help us have a right relationship with God?

Also do you and Ms. Rose have any children?

My soon to be un-husband has a lot of questions just like yours about the bible and “religion” in general and just like you he has yet to find the answers he needs for his heart, and I’m sorry you had that HORRIBLE experience with the “apoligetics” movement, until you listed it on your website I didn’t even know who the man was. I do pray that my Abba will answer your very heartfelt questions! Cause I probabley won’t be able to (grin).

Amber

Hi Amber,

I appreciate your thoughtful questions.

Q: Do you believe God is real? a Supreme Being that had the intelligence and power to create the natural universe as we know it right now?

A: I do not believe in a “Supreme Being” in the sense of traditional Christian theism for a variety of reasons. It is literally impossible for me to believe it because the concept does not appear to be logically coherent. You can’t have an eternal unchanging agent who exists outside of time and yet acts within time. If God acts, then God changes from a state of not-having-acted to a state of having-acted. That implies change which is denied by traditional theism. Therefore, it is literally impossible for that kind of God to be an explanation for the creation space and time. We have a similar problem with omniscience. An omniscient being never had a chance to make any choices which means that God is more like a brute fact or law of nature than a conscious living person who can choose or plan anything. What then determines what he does if he never made any choices? This entirely contradicts the traditional Christian concept of God. There  are too many philosophical problems generated by the concept of an “omniscient eternal unchanging God.” He wouldn’t be anything like a “person” who can choose or love or plan or do anything at all. I can believe in neither the “God of the philosophers” (which directly contradicts what the Bible says about God) nor the God of the Bible (because of the incoherent Biblical picture as well as the moral abominations attributed to him). So given this mass of philosophical confusion and unbelievable religious claims of the Bible, I find it quite impossible to believe in such any variety of the Christian God.

Now I don’t rule out the possibility that there is some sort of “Supreme Being” but I don’t see that concept as a necessary (or helpful) explanation of anything we see in the natural world. Sure, there are things we cannot yet explain, but positing God moves us no closer to any authentic understanding as far as I can tell.

I quote Scriptures when discussing what the Bible says with Christians. It doesn’t mean I believe or disbelieve that they are true. I would do the same thing when discussing the Quran or the Book of Mormon or Shakespeare.

Q: And do you still believe that Jesus is the bridge to help us have a right relationship with God?

A: No. If I believed that I would be a Christian. I don’t have any firm position on who Jesus was right now. It is impossible to discern much if anything about the “historical Jesus” because he has been buried under so many layers of myth.

Q: Also do you and Ms. Rose have any children? 

A: Yes, we have three sons and many cats.

Q: My soon to be un-husband has a lot of questions just like yours about the bible and “religion” in general and just like you he has yet to find the answers he needs for his heart …

A: Actually, I wouldn’t say I haven’t found any answers. I think my rejection of Christianity is a valid answer to the problems I have found with that religion. The only mystery that remains involves the seemingly “supernatural” patterns in the Bible such as the Bible Wheel and the Biblical Holographs.  I have no explanation for how they got there or what they mean. But that’s just another mystery, and there are plenty of mysteries in this world. Perhaps the evidence is not as strong as I thought and it could be explained by cognitive biases. That’s what opponents of my work have always said. But they never were able to support their case and I’m pretty good at noting cognitive biases in others (see my article on The Art of Rationalization) and I’ve applied the same standards  to myself so this explanation simply does work as far as I can tell.

Q: and I’m sorry you had that HORRIBLE experience with the “apoligetics” movement

A: The problem was not with “my experience” but rather with the reality of how Christianity tends to corrupt both the minds and the morals of believers.

Q: I do pray that my Abba will answer your very heartfelt questions! Cause I probabley won’t be able to (grin).

A: Thank you for your kind thoughts, but there is no reason to think that there are any “answers” to the problems I have exposed. If there were they would have been discovered long ago and the apologists would not have had to corrupt themselves with sophistry and deception in their effort to prove the “truth” of their religion. What could be more ironic?

So here’s a question for you Amber – Which variety of Christianity do you believe in, and why?

Great chatting!

Richard

Posted in Losing My Religion, Why Christianity is False | Leave a comment

Two Thousand Reasons to Believe Dr. Hugh Ross Might Not Be Entirely Credible

By R. A. McGough | Published: March 29, 2013

Unique among all books ever written, the Bible accurately foretells specific events-in detail-many years, sometimes centuries, before they occur. Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter—no errors. ~ Dr. Hugh Ross

With these words Dr. Hugh Ross simultaneously opened and eviscerated his article Fulfilled Prophecy: Evidence for the Reliability of the Bible. Are there really about 2000 prophecies that have been fulfilled “to the letter” with no errors? Is that claim reliable? Is it true in any sense of the word? Would it pass peer review? There is only one answer to these questions: a definitive NO spoken with profound exasperation and pity. His claim is so far off the charts of absurdity that it can only be described as the ravings of an utterly delusional mind. And worse, the evidence he presents is riddled with the most elementary errors in logic and fact. He repeatedly begs the question by assuming the reliability of the Bible on the very points required to prove it. He committed this fallacy numerous times in his short article which lists thirteen examples chosen because they “exemplify the high degree of specificity, the range of projection, and/or the ‘supernature’ of the predicted events.” I begin with his second example:

(2) In approximately 700 B.C. the prophet Micah named the tiny village of Bethlehem as the birthplace of Israel’s Messiah (Micah 5:2). The fulfillment of this prophecy in the birth of Christ is one of the most widely known and widely celebrated facts in history. Read More »

Posted in Biblical Issues | Tagged , , | 24 Responses

Ending Desertification: Real hope for the future

By R. A. McGough | Published: March 10, 2013

This TED talk realy talks to me. From the description:

Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Posted in Global Warming, Politics | 1 Response

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

By R. A. McGough | Published: January 27, 2013

The idea of “open source” has transformed the world of software (e.g. Linux, Google Office) and information (e.g. Wikipedia). Now it’s time to transform the world in a very tangible way with open source hardware, where the rubber hits the road.

I learned about this on NPR’s TED Radio Hour episode called The Power of Crowds.  Very much worth a listen.

From the NPR page:

Marcin Jakubowski believes that the only way to achieve abundance for all is by opening the means of production. Through this, he says, “We can lead self-sustaining lives without sacrificing our standard of living.”

Though he has a Ph.D. in fusion physics, Jakubowski chose a life as a farmer and social innovator. He is the founder of Open Source Ecology, which is creating the Global Village Construction Set. He’s putting these ideas to the test at Factor e Farm in rural Missouri.

Posted in Science | Leave a comment

Why most Animals are not Philosophers: Fatal Flaws in Dr. Craig’s Moral Argument for God

By R. A. McGough | Published: January 18, 2013

thinking-monkey-rA moral agent is defined as any being able to make moral judgments and be subject to them. Moral agents must possess two faculties. They must be self-aware else they could not make judgments with respect to their own actions and so could not be held responsible. And in as much as moral judgments are stated as propositions, they must have a faculty of language. This is why non-human animals are not moral agents (or philosophers). These basic definitions expose a complex set of errors in both Dr. Craig’s defense of his Moral Argument for God as well as the secular philosophers he cites in support of it. I begin on page 172 of his book Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics where he states his syllogism:

  1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

Craig defends his first premise by asserting that atheism implies an undifferentiated equivalence between humans and all other animals. Beginning on page 174, he states: Read More »

Posted in Moral Theory | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

2013 New Year Reflections: How Integrity led me into and drove me out of Evangelical Christianity

By R. A. McGough | Published: January 10, 2013
love_unity_2013

An expression of my 2013 New  Year meme I found on Facebook.

My meme for the New Year is “Let 2013 be the Year of Love and Unity.” I coined this meme at the end of my New Year’s Eve article On Integrity as the Highest Value where I discussed the fundamental ontological unity of the concepts of love, unity, and integrity which is the basis of my moral theory described in The Logic of Love: A Natural Theory of Morality.

My recent reflections on the theme of integrity were sparked by a desire to answer the fallacious religious argument that there would be no objective morality without God and the equally fallacious secular response that there is no objective morality at all. My answer is that morality is fundamentally ontological in the sense that it derives naturally from what we mean for something (or someone) to be, to exist. That’s why the word integrity means both “to be complete, whole” and “to be morally upright.” Our language exposes the innate ontological relation between integrity and morality. And just as integrity is an objective fact, so also are moral values which are a measure of the integrity of our selves in relation to others.

One of my New Year’s projects was to update this blog to accurately reflect who I am and what I believe which has changed a lot in the last three years.  In the process of reorganizing it, I encountered some of my old articles which reminded me how this theme of integrity has dominated my life for a long time. Indeed, it was integrity that solidified my Christian faith, and integrity that drove me from it. Read More »

Posted in Losing My Religion, Thinking Freely | Tagged , , , , , , , | 27 Responses

On Integrity as the Highest Value

By R. A. McGough | Published: December 31, 2012

INTEGRITY:

  1. The state of being whole, undivided, perfect in composition; unity, wholeness, completeness.
  2. The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
moral_compass

Moral Compass

Integrity is the grand unifying concept of all knowledge and philosophy. It is the way, the means, and the end all in one. It is the ultimate value that subsumes all other values and explains why they are valuable. It is what defines a self or any entity that exists. Its absence literally entails disintegration, corruption, and confusion. Integrity is the root of all that is good and true. It is an end in itself. Read More »

Posted in Philosophy | 1 Response

The Logic of Love: A Natural Theory of Morality

By R. A. McGough | Published: October 25, 2012

All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
All you need is love (all together now)
All you need is love (everybody)
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
~ The Beatles (1967)

This article presents an objective, naturalistic, scientific theory of morality. It is presented as an answer to the religious argument that there would be no objective morality without God and the equally fallacious secular argument that there is no objective morality at all. It is based on the same fundamental principles that have guided modern physicists to discover the unified laws of nature. To understand it, we first must review the essential nature of science and the historical trajectory that has led to the modern unified theories. Read More »

Posted in Christianity, Moral Theory | Tagged , , | 6 Responses

The Inextricable Sexism of the Bible

By R. A. McGough | Published: October 18, 2012

The Theological Sexism of the Bible

The Bible is an ancient book written by primitive men with primitive morals, chief amongst them being a thoroughly sexist view of women. Sexism saturates the Bible from beginning to end. It is inextricable because it is entwined with the fundamental theological understanding of God himself who is not only male but a Trinity of males consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This male God stands at the head of a hierarchy of male authority that puts women at the bottom:

But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Cor 11:3)

The sexism of the Bible cannot be denied without attacking its fundamental theological view of God and his relation to humans:

  • Male Ruler: God
  • Male Ruler: Christ
  • Male Ruler: Man
  • Female Subject: Woman

This view is confirmed and amplified in many passages. It is the basis of the fundamental analogical relationship between God (Husband) and the Church (Wife):

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. 24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Eph 5:22-24)

Wives are to be subject to their husbands in the same way as their husbands are subject to God and this is the biblical image of the relation between God and his people. Peter confirms this view when he says that wives should submit to their husbands and call them “lord” – Read More »

Posted in Biblical Issues | 10 Responses

The Golden Rule and the Foundation of Objective Morality

By R. A. McGough | Published: October 11, 2012
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. ~ Matthew 7:12 (NIV)

The “Moral Argument for God” asserts that there would be no moral truths if there were no God. Here is how prominent Christian apologist William Lane Craig formulates the argument:

  1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

His argument is flawed because the concept of “duty” imports his conclusion by implying the existence of social norms and laws which require a legislative agent whereas our moral intuitions are based on what we think is right or wrong regardless of such things. Our moral intuitions are based entirely on the nature of the action itself and its effect on sentient beings. They have absolutely nothing to do with social norms or duties. This is self-evident because any social norm is itself subject to moral judgment. They can be moral or immoral. Dr. Craig’s error is evident from a simple review of Webster’s definition of duty which depends critically on legislative agents like parents, superiors, civil laws, and institutions like the military: Read More »

Posted in Christianity, Moral Theory | 1 Response