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Irrational Thinking Leads to Irrational Acts

COGIC Pastor Accused of Molesting 16-year-old Family Member | WREG.com

The alleged victim apparently told church and other family members about the abuse, but instead of calling police, they prayed the Lord would make it stop.

I understand the impulse to pray. I still have it despite having let go of faith. When something terrible happens, my first instinct is to call on God for help. Conditioning is a bitch to get rid of. And back when I was a Christian, prayer was my first line of defense. I don't begrudge people who pray. It can be a powerful psychological assist when there are no other options. But there were plenty of other options here. This family failed to protect this child. Pray all you want AFTER you call the damn police.

The Freedom to Think Horrible Thoughts

One of the greatest gifts skepticism has given me is the freedom to have terrible, awful, horrible thoughts. Things you're not supposed to think about. Anti-social, nasty things. Back when I was religious, I ran away from such thoughts. You're not supposed to think about things that are unpleasant or sinful. Push them away, refuse to think about them, pray to overcome them, run away, ignore, deny.

But since I became a skeptic and realized, gratefully, that there is no magic genie listening to my every thought, I have been free to entertain some of those ideas and to judge them on their individual merits.

It's so much more liberating to think about something controversial or frightening or culturally unacceptable and then let it go because the evidence suggests it's not true (or the opposite) than to push it away, unresolved, because the powers that be say it's forbidden to even think about. Bad ideas should be rejected because they're not true or unrealistic or measurably harmful, not because some book written thousands of years ago says that they're sinful.

It's the difference between shoving all of your garbage under the sofa in the hopes that it will magically disappear and actually taking out the trash and giving the house a good scrubbing. One ignores the problem; the other solves it.

Did Jesus Exist? It's the Question That's the Problem, Not the Answer.

Every so often, the question of the scholarly consensus on the existence of Jesus comes up, and both atheists and Christians tend to get over-excited by the answer. I believe we should be more concerned with the question than the answer, and when the right question is asked, the answer becomes a total non-issue for people on both sides of the debate.

When Christians (and some atheists) ask, "Did Jesus exist?" the question they're REALLY asking is, "Did the son of God come down from heaven, incarnate as a man named Jesus, perform supernatural miracles, resurrect himself from the dead, and ascend back to heaven?" But they don't say that. What they SAY is, "Did Jesus exist?" And when they get the answer, "Yes," they lose their collective shit, the Christians in smug triumph and the atheists in disappointed disbelief.

But what is the actual question that Biblical scholars and historians are attempting to answer? It's just this: "Was there a Jewish apocalyptic preacher in 1st century Palestine named Yeshua or something like it who either claimed or was believed by his followers to be the messiah and who was executed by the Romans?"

The scholarly consensus is, "Yes, there probably was such a person, and the New Testament is most likely based on the stories that sprung up among his followers surrounding his life, death, and teachings." That's it.

But that's not the real question, remember? The real question is, "Did the son of God come down from heaven, incarnate as a man named Jesus, perform supernatural miracles, resurrect himself from the dead, and ascend back to heaven?"

So what is the answer to THAT question? What is the scholarly consensus on THAT issue, the REAL issue? The answer so far as I have been able to determine is, "We simply do not have any hard evidence to support the idea that these supernatural events actually happened, and that's not a question that history and textual criticism can or should attempt to answer."

So where does that leave us, Christians and atheists alike? It leaves us with a giant red herring. The question of whether the historical Jesus existed is a non-issue. The supernatural claims cannot be proven, which leaves Christian apologists without a leg to stand on when it comes to proving the religious claims of Christianity, and you cannot prove that the MAN Jesus did NOT exist, which means that atheists cannot use that as an argument against Christianity.

It simply does not matter. Now, if someone could definitively prove that the supernatural claims of the Christians really did happen, then it would matter. Conversely, if someone could definitively prove that Jesus the man did not exist, that would also matter. But neither of those things is provable, so the speculation from both sides is meaningless.

The only thing that actually matters is ensuring that the RIGHT question is being asked and that people do not accept the scholars', "Yes," as the answer to a question they aren't attempting to answer.

Why "Last Thursdayism" Fails - A Comment From a Redditor

How do you counter the "biblical worldview" card when it is played by Christians? : TrueAtheism

Let's suppose that God created everything, including all of my memories of life before that time, last Thursday. If He did a perfect job, I'll never be able to tell. But what people arguing about this miss is that I don't have to be able to tell. As long as the illusion of age is perfect, behaving as if it's true will never lead me into error!

I'm just leaving out the middle part of the statement "the planet is exactly as if were 4.72 billion years old" as not contributing anything useful.

What we're making from the evidence is not stories, but predictions. The explanation is only a useful mental tool for getting to what's important: accurate predictions of the future.

Epidemiologists and oncologists and biologists use the theory of evolution every day to make predictions about what will happen in particular situations. And as long as the theory keeps making accurate predictions, they'd be stupid to give it up.

If a young earth, or separate creation makes the slightest difference at all to what those predictions should be, to what we will observe in the rest of our lives, then let's explore the differences and resolve the dispute. But so far every attempt by creationists to come up with a theory that's different in any detail from the modern evolutionary synthesis, but still consistent with observed reality, it's been an embarrassing failure.

The Creature at the Edge of the Woods

This morning as I was walking my dogs, something caught my eye at the edge of the stand of trees that backs up to my property. It was large, at least seven feet tall, dark brown, and shaped like some sort of giant, hulking man. I've lived on this property for 13 years now and have never observed anything larger than a fox.
 

My breath caught in my throat. "What IS that thing?" I thought to myself. I stood watching for a moment, and when the creature didn't move, I got curious and decided to investigate. I moved slowly toward the tree-line then picked up my pace.

I was about 50 feet from the trees when I realized what it was: the wet bark of a large oak outlined by branches. We've had a bit of snow in the last week, and sometime last night or early this morning, some of the branches on the locust tree in front of the oak had snapped off under the weight forming an interesting "frame" around the bark of the tree behind it, a frame that from a distance looks very much like a tall, hulking, bipedal animal. Exactly like one, in fact. It is still surprising to me just how alive and realistic this illusion was. I saw it at precisely the right time.

So what's my point? Well, what might have happened had I seen that and not had time to investigate? The oak bark was only dark because it was wet. Later in the day, it will dry and blend in with the trees around it. If I had rushed off to work and come back and noticed that the "creature" was gone, would I be writing a different blog post? Would I, two or three or ten years down the road, still be talking about the "unexplained" animal-like thing I had seen? Given my current skeptical outlook, probably not. But had this happened a few years back when I was still a firm believer in the supernatural and paranormal, who knows what I might have believed had I not investigated?

Our perception is faulty. We have evolved to perceive patterns (and threats) in our environment. After all, the ape that ran from an imaginary lion was much more likely to survive and pass on its genes than the ape that assumed the lion wasn't really there. Those instincts are still there. We trust our senses, even though the best research we have says that eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as once believed.

How many "paranormal" or "anomalous" experiences are the result of something just like this? A convincing illusion is still just an illusion, but when we are unwilling or unable to investigate the cause of such an illusion and when we give our senses more credit than they deserve, the illusion becomes real.  We become convinced that what we perceived was actually there. We tell the story, and it becomes part of our worldview. Then, the next time the snow falls and our eyes deceive us, we become that much more likely to believe that the creature at the edge of the woods is actually there.