Beliefs--Be Careful

An excerpt from an internet debate I recently read:
 

Christian:

"when people are on the outside, they aren't going to understand it. Being on the inside, I just can't explain it. God's love is something you have to experience firsthand." 

 

Skeptic: 

I was a Christian until age 21. Therefore, I was on the inside, and I do understand it. When you think God loves you, it feels great. When you think you're going to heaven, it feels great. When you think you won the lottery, it feels great. The belief can make you feel great, independent of whether [the] belief is true or not.       

 

People love to believe in gods. That fact makes it prudent to carefully vet one's beliefs to try to make sure they are in line with the evidence, rather than being in line with what we want to believe.

Self-Deception

A great article from The Skeptic's Dictionary  about self self-deception. Confirmation bias is something that we all have a tendency for. And knowing this, we should be forewarned so that we will make a concerted effort to nullify this tendency in our search for truth:

Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept claims about ourselves as true or valid when they are false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs about ourselves to ourselves.

When philosophers and psychologists discuss self-deception, they usually focus on unconscious motivations and intentions. They also usually consider self-deception as a bad thing, something to guard against. To explain how self-deception works, they focus on self-interest, prejudice, desire, insecurity, and other psychological factors unconsciously affecting in a negative way the will to believe. A common example would be that of a parent who believes his child is telling the truth even though the objective evidence strongly supports the claim that the child is lying. The parent, it is said, deceives him or herself into believing the child because the parent desires that the child tell the truth. A belief so motivated is usually considered more flawed than one due to lack of ability to evaluate evidence properly. The former is considered to be a kind of moral flaw, a kind of dishonesty, and irrational. The latter is considered to be a matter of fate: some people are just not gifted enough to make proper inferences from the data of perception and experience.

The Garden Of Eden Myth And The "Messiah"

A comment by Farrell Till from the II Errancy discussion list, 11-29-06: TILL What we have here is just another spin that NT writers put on an OT text to make it appear that the Jewish scriptures pointed to the coming of Jesus. Jewish literature itself, however, indicated that the Garden of Eden yarn was intended as nothing more than an explanation of traditional concerns like why is survival such a struggle, why do snakes crawl instead of walking on legs, why are people almost universally afraid of snakes, and why is childbirth so painful? The answers are in the Garden of Eden myth. God pronounced curses on all parties involved in the first "sin." The man was doomed to have to earn his living by the sweat of his brow tilling land that brings forth thorns and thistles, the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly and eat the dust of the earth, enmity between the seeds of the serpent and the woman was decreed (the one would bruise the heel of the seed of the woman; the other would bruise the head of the seed of the serpent), and women would bring forth offspring in pain. See Josephus's Antiquities 1:1,4 (49-51). When humans encounter snakes, they risk being bitten [on the heel], so their first inclination is to kill the snake, usually by crushing its head. Christians have distorted a myth, intended to explain puzzling aspects of life, into some mystical prophecy of their Messiah. As I have previously asked, is there anything sillier than theological assumptions?

 

The Uniqueness Of The Bible

Farrell Till answers Josh McDowell's, "The Uniqueness of the Bible", link.

A Simple Question

by Kenneth W. Hawthorne

The following is a comment that I made on a Church of Christ 
discussion group in 2011 (slightly edited):

The question I asked you: "If you wanted to have a child but you knew

before conceiving this child that if you conceived it and brought it

into the world that it would wind up suffering forever in hell, would

you go ahead and conceive that child and bring it into the world?" is

not a question like, "Are you still beating your wife?", which is an

example of a complex question fallacy. Such a fallacy is when a question

is asked that is composed of a presupposition that is false--you have

been beating your wife. It would be possible, though, that the question

could be a legitimate question if it was a known fact that the man being

asked the question had in fact been guilty of beating his wife.

The question that I asked you is not such a question. The question I

asked you is a simple, legitimate, hypothetical question. The question

that I asked you is comparable to, If you knew that you would die in a

car accident tomorrow if you drove to Little Rock, would you drive to

Little Rock tomorrow? The answer is so obviously "No", that the question

is ridiculously absurd. And I think I can safely say that you would

quickly answer that question with a "No", and laugh at the questioner

for asking such a question. But, in regard to my question about whether

you would conceive and bring a child into the world, knowing it would

wind up suffering for eternity in hell, which is even more absurd and

which calls for an even quicker response and even more obvious answer
of "No", you stammer and hesitate...and you won't answer the question.
Why? Because of your fanatical, credulous, unfounded, delusional
devotion to Yahweh. Your answer might make Yahweh look bad. Well,
he is bad. He's worse than bad. He's so fiendish and so infinitely horrible
that taking into consideration his alleged omni qualities--he is a
contradiction, an impossibility.

My question to you involves what we know the Bible teaches about
Yahweh and his eternal hell and is a legitimate question based on
what the Bible admits to. So why the hesitation to answer what should
be a very easy question for a devoted Yahwehist to answer? If Yahweh
has no problem in sending multiplied billions of his sentient, beloved(?)

humans to his eternal hell, having had this knowledge before he created

the first human, why would a Yahwehist who looks to him as our example

to follow, have a problem with allowing only one child to come into the

world, knowing that child will wind up in hell?

Arguments From Absence Of Evidence

The following is part of an excellent discussion between Farrell Till and a Christian, Paul Smith, on when absence of evidence, where there should be evidence, is a good argument against a claim. From the alt. Bible. errancy Yahoo group, May 21, 2000:

TILL (1)
Kent, you and David Sparrow need to put your heads together. The two of
you, working independently, have yet to provide a sensible explanation for
this absence of evidence that should be there if these [Exodus] wilderness
stories are historically accurate.

SMITH: (2)
Woah! ...does this mean that arguments from absence are now
considered weighty here? Cool! Someone please let me know,
'cuz I have a BUNCH of arguments from absence that I think bode
well for the God Hypothesis -

TILL (3)
Now, come on, Paul, you have to know that the absence of evidence
where evidence would have to be if certain alleged events had happened
is a compelling reason not to believe reports of the events. If someone
tells you that a flash flood swept through Podunk Valley last week, what
are you going to conclude if you go to Podunk Valley and see no evidence
that would have to be present if such a flood had occurred? This is so
simple that you can surely see it. I'm sure that if you saw absolutely no
evidence of a flash flood, you would view with suspicion any claims that
the civic pride in Podunk Valley was such that everyone had worked
diligently to clean up and repair the damage and that this is why no signs
of the flood remain. You would know that such would be too unlikely
to believe.

Credulity Or Critical Thinking?

by Kenneth W. Hawthorne

Is the phrase, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (with all due respect to Carl Sagan), sufficient to describe miraculous claims and the evidence needed to prove them? (miracle, "a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency:") (extraordinary, "1 a: going beyond what is usual, regular or customary...; b: exceptional to a very marked extent," and is normally used to describe naturally occurring events that are out of the ordinary.) So it seems to me this phrase is lacking--the word extraordinary just seems too generic for this purpose.

We need a phrase that immediately and unambiguously gets to the heart of the type of evidence it would take to prove miraculous claims. Let's take the miraculous claim that a man came back to life after being dead for three days. It is more than a claim that something beyond what is usual or regular occurred; it is more than a claim that something exceptional to a very marked degree occurred. This claim is more than extraordinary it is miraculous. It is a ridiculously absurd, and preposterous claim if it is not accompanied by unimpeachable, unequivocal, irrefutable evidence. A more appropriate phrase in regard to miraculous claims such as a man coming back to life after being dead for three days, would be: Miraculous claims require unimpeachable, unequivocal, irrefutable evidence.

The New Testament  presents the miraculous claim that Jesus Christ came back to life after being dead for almost three days and says that if you don't believe it you will die in your sins (John 8:24) and suffer eternally in hell (Mt. 7:13-14). With allegedly so much on the line what kind of evidence does the New Testament give us that this miraculous claim actually happened? Unimpeachable, unequivocal, irrefutable evidence that would put an end to all doubt and thus prove this miraculous claim? Hardly. What the loving, merciful Yahweh, who allegedly is not willing that any should perish, has given us is completely inadequate hearsay testimony that this miraculous event happened.

If miracles were allegedly performed to "attest" (Acts 2:22) deity to humans in the first century A.D., in order "[to] provide...clear evidence" for them to believe in and obey this "divine agency", why would this type of evidence be withheld by God today? It is impossible for testimony (especially hearsay testimony) to even come close to the level of evidence needed for a rational person to believe miraculous claims. Is this what the God of the Universe wants from his intelligent creation--credulity rather than critical thinking? I don't think so. (By the way, I know my heart and if Yahweh is God he also knows my heart and both of us know what it would take for me to be a believer--so, what is Yahweh waiting on?)