God Who Cares? (Atheist) - DeYtH Banger, VeNgeR GrEenTag (feel good books .txt) 📗

harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The first-born of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do likewise with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall be with its dam; on the eighth day you shall give it to me. (RSV)

    The context of this passage concerns offerings and sacrifices, and it says God requires firstborn sons to be literally sacrificed to him. Later on we find Yahweh admitting he commanded this in Ezekiel 20:25–26, where he purportedly said:

    Moreover I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life; and I defiled them through their very gifts in making them offer by fire all their first-born, that I might horrify them; I did it that they might know that I am the LORD [Yahweh]. (RSV)."

- John W. Loftus



"The case of Micah 6:6–8 is an interesting one. In it child sacrifice is considered the greatest and highest form of sacrifice, for the prophet has a progression of three parts in pondering what will please Yahweh the most. Micah first considers sacrificing one-year-old calves; then he considers sacrificing thousands of rams; then he culminates in considering the highest offering he could give Yahweh: his firstborn son. His logic depends on child sacrifice being the greatest sacrifice of all—more than that of sacrificing the calves or rams—for the shocking conclusion of his ruminations is that even this greatest sacrifice is unacceptable to Yahweh without justice. For while all of these acts were required by Yahweh, they meant nothing without also doing acts of justice.

    Child sacrifice was only later considered evil after Josiah’s reforms and even more so after the Babylonian exile. Even the later rhetoric in Deuteronomy 12:29–31 and Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35 which condemns the practice all assumes that people thought it was acceptable to Yahweh. Otherwise why would these later authors find a need to condemn it? In other texts the practice was condemned primarily because it was offered to other deities (2 Kings 17:17; 23:10; 2 Chron. 28:3; 33:4–10; Ps. 106:38; Isa. 57:5–6; Ezek. 16:20–21; 20:26, 31; 23:37, 39)."

- John W. Loftus Bible Arguments (2)

 By DeYtH Banger



"So despite some biblical exhortations that child sacrifice was alien to the worship of Yahweh, a closer inspection shows instead that this practice was within the mainstream theology of the Yahweh cult. Only at a late stage in the history of Israelite religion was child sacrifice branded as counter to the will of Yahweh.

    Nearly all ancient cultures sacrificed human beings—especially virgins and children—to their gods to please them. This is utterly barbaric, conceived by a barbaric people who had no clue what an eternally good God could ever want them to do. In the New Testament Christians even interpreted the death of Jesus as God sacrificing his only begotten Son to atone for our sins."

- John W. Loftus



"Randal is rejecting the Bible in favor of his own moral intuitions here—ones I share. That’s what he’s doing. And if he can do this once, then why not just reject it all along with me? He has the gall to proclaim, despite the evidence, that God is “a maximally competent author.” But if this is true, why did his God communicate in such an incompetent manner that caused a number of children to be needlessly butchered."

- John W. Loftus




"Primarily we’ve learned that the gods are not leaning over a celestial balcony looking down on earth and smelling the smoke of burning flesh as it rises to them. Nor do they open the floodgates of heaven to send rain for our crops. The universe is bigger than this and the rain falls naturally. So there is no one “up there” we need to appease. And there is no reason to kill our children to make it rain either."

- John W. Loftus



"Can’t he say “no, don’t do that,” like any good parent? This is a lame excuse for a God. This practice is barbaric by Randal’s own standards, which is the point."

- John W. Loftus



"John’s Opening Statement

    There are several genocidal texts from the lips of Yahweh, the biblical God. You see it reflected in Joshua 6:16–25; Deuteronomy 2:4–34; 7:1–6; and

Numbers 31:7–18 (cf. Isa. 13:13–22; Ps. 137:7–9). In Deuteronomy 20:16–18 we read:

    But as for the towns of these peoples that the LORD [Yahweh] your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the LORD [Yahweh] your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the LORD [Yahweh] your God. (NRSV)

    In 1 Samuel 15:1–3 we read:

    And Samuel said to Saul, “The LORD [Yahweh] sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore hearken to the words of the LORD [Yahweh]. Thus says the LORD of hosts [Yahweh of Armies], ‘I will punish what Amalek did to Israel in opposing

them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” (RSV)

    The rationale for justifying genocide has fallen by the wayside among evangelicals since there can be no justifying it—not in an era that endorses the Geneva Convention, which condemns the killing of innocent noncombatants. Randal is one of these evangelicals, so I’ll let him make that case for me. All such attempts fail. They ultimately force apologists to embrace a cultural relativism."


- John W. Loftus


"By contrast, the God of the Bible exacerbated child exploitation with his so-called “satire” because it was written in an era when genocide was not morally questionable. Believers have likewise obeyed the Bible precisely because it’s considered divinely inspired. It was obvious to everyone that Swift was writing a satire, whereas this is not the case at all with the God of the Bible. Randal’s moral intuitions have merely caused him to once again reject the Bible."

- John W. Loftus


"The God explanation has suffered so many huge hits that it’s surprising anyone continues to tout it at all.

    Thomas Aquinas argued that God was the unmoved mover in a series of contemporaneous events stretching hierarchically up some sort of great chain of being. But such an argument is rendered bogus in light of the concept of inertia, which does away with the need to explain motion as requiring either an infinite regress of causes or an unmoved mover. And so it goes for all of the other cosmological and design arguments to the existence of God—something I won’t pursue further here."

- John W. Loftus


"As modern science advances, it creates an ever-increasing number of new mysteries that scientists are in the process of solving. So faith will probably always find a foothold in mystery. This is the reason why I must show Randal’s faith is impossible before he will ever consider it to be improbable, which is an unreasonable standard. My point is that science, not faith, solved the mysteries of the past, and it is science, not faith, that has opened up the number of new mysteries today. Faith by contrast has no method and solves no mysteries."

- John W. Loftus



"Faith by itself produces nothing and is dead without mysteries.

    As far as I can tell, even if there is a god of some kind, he may have only created what Edward Tryon and Stephen Hawking both describe as a “quantum wave fluctuation”[11] and then committed divine suicide afterwards, or died in order to create. Or instead, a god may exist who is guiding the universe ultimately toward an evil purpose but has maliciously chosen to present himself as benevolent to trick us. If such a trickster god exists, then all of the evidence leading Christians to conclude their good God exists was simply planted there to deceive us by that very same God. I can see no reasonable objection to these other god-hypotheses once we allow them into our equations."


- John W. Loftus


"So even if there is a God who created the whole shebang, then as far as I can tell there is no reason to believe this god is Randal’s God. Such an entity is therefore an unnecessary hypothesis. It actually gets in the way of solving the mysteries of existence, as history repeatedly shows."

- John W. Loftus


"Can we really imagine a being who never learned anything? Can we really imagine a being who cannot think, since doing so means a conclusion has not been reached yet? How did this nonmaterial agent create a material universe out of nothing unless there is some aspect that this agent shares with a material world? How did a timeless being create the universe in time, since the very decision to create it would be simultaneous with the act of creating it? The universe would therefore be an eternal one if he created it at all, and such a being would never be found timeless. Finally, why did he create anything at all, since he neither needs nor wants anything at all."

- John W. Loftus



"With Randal’s God explanation there is no reason to investigate why the universe exists, since he says science can’t do this. This is the standard theistic response to the unsolved mysteries of the past. Why keep betting on faith to solve them when it has solved nothing so far."

- John W. Loftus

Bible Arguments (3)

 By DeYtH Banger



"This topic raises the issue of the goodness of the divine revelation in the Bible for a good, omnipotent, and omniscient God. It also raises the problem of suffering (or evil) if such a God exists. If any issue speaks against the goodness of the biblical conception of God, this is it.

    Former American slave Frederick Douglass described how his Christian master whipped his aunt right before his young eyes:

    He took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist. He made her get upon the stool, and he tied her hands to a hook in the joist. After rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood came dripping to the floor. . . . No words, no tears, no prayers,