It’s May 21 – The Harold Camping Delusional Doomsday Memorial Day

By R. A. McGough | Published: May 22, 2013

IJudgment Day May 21 Billboardt’s been two years since Harold Camping had his judgement day. He had spent years proclaiming that “the Bible guaranteed” that the Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011, to be followed by five months of terror on earth known as the “Great Tribulation” before the final destruction of the entire universe. He declared his prediction could be wrong only if the Bible was wrong which was, of course, inconceivable to his fundamentalist audience. Day after day he thundered from his radio studio “THUS SAYETH THE LORD – IT. IS. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.” The absolute certainty of his “Gospel” was the opium craved by his religiously programmed followers. And  like a highly skilled drug pusher he made a killing to the tune of 80 MILLION DOLLARS in just five years from 2005 – 2009 selling his doomsday message to his utterly deluded followers. That’s some serious cash from the best cash cow of all time – religion.

The really amazing thing is that it took Harold Camping about nine months to admit he was wrong, and even then he blamed God saying that He had the prerogative to mislead his faithful servants (read Harold Camping and his followers) for his own divine purposes. And crazier than that, there are still followers of Camping on www.ebiblefellowship.com/ that declare his end-times calendar is perfectly correct! Such is the madness of religion.

Posted in Why Christianity is False | Tagged , | 1 Response

From Life-Long Skeptic to Gullible Young Earth Creationist?

By R. A. McGough | Published: May 20, 2013

I received this comment recently from one Pedro Cuestra who presents himself as a “life-long skeptic” who has “recently come into the knowledge of the God of the (entire) bible” and so is now a Young Earth Creationist.

Dear Richard,

I recently came across your biblewheel.com and was nearly blown away with it. I say nearly because I’m a life-long skeptic who has recently come into the knowledge of the God of the (entire) bible and I don’t know enough gematria or hebrew or greek to disprove your analysis. Kudos for your work, insight and revelations to the extent that they are actually trustworthy!

Hey there Pedro,

Thanks for the kudos, but I suspect the only reason you would say such a thing is because you think my work confirms your beliefs. I get this impression because you admit that you do not actually “know enough” to evaluate the results yet you praise them “to the extent that they are actually trustworthy”. That seems like a very strange way of thinking. Why praise them at all if you can’t evaluate their validity? Later in your comments you do the opposite with well-established scientific results supporting evolution when you show extreme skepticism for no apparent reason except that the evidence contradicts your religious beliefs. This is a very dangerous distortion of judgment known as a “confirmation bias”. It is one of the primary reasons people hold to irrational and unsupported beliefs which can become full-blown delusions if you are not careful. This error is extremely common amongst Christian fundamentalists, especially those who seek to prove the truth of the Bible. I explain this in some detail in my article The Art of Rationalization: A Case Study of Christian Apologist Rich Deem. Read More »

Posted in Evolution | Tagged | Leave a comment

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? Read More »

Posted in Losing My Religion, Why Christianity is False | 3 Responses

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 , , | 29 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