I began my critique of Keller’s The Reason for God with an exposé of everything up through Chapter 1. I continued with Chapter 2. Here I cover Chapters 3 through 5. Next will be Chapter 6. I’ll continue to other chapters in future installments. Today the problem is not so much Keller’s usual tactic of lying. In these chapters, what we get a scary dose of is Keller’s ignorance.

• Champions of Evil
• Morality Sans Authority
• Curing the Sins of Christendom
• Hell: The Ultimate Evil
• Summary

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Champions of Evil

I showed already in the last installment how Christianity perverts Keller and everyone like him into defenders of evil. This trend continues in evidence as we proceed through his book.

Christian teaching, Keller admits, “seems to contemporary observers to endanger civic freedom, because it divides rather than unites our population” (p. 35). Just as Jesus said he would do. As Keller’s Jesus said:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:51-53)

Yep. Jesus was a dick. At least, the mythical one in the Gospels was. Instead of admitting that’s just what his own god’s Book says and entails, Keller wants to deny this—because, after all, this makes his religion look really awful. Because. You know. It is.

The way he spells it out is, “Christianity looks like an enemy of social cohesion, cultural adaptability, and even authentic personhood,” with all its judgmental rules and active hostility to social and moral progress (and its condemnation of non-members, and even non-conformers, as deserving of the worst of all possible fates). “However,” Keller says, “this objection is based on mistakes about the nature of truth, community, Christianity, and of liberty itself” (p. 37). Of course, Keller is confusing what he wishes Christianity were, with what it actually becomes in practice. It always combats and punishes freedom and independence. The only difference by sect is how much or little; and those sects that do it too little, eventually fade away—becoming de facto secular communities, with no distinctive theology, and at best a vague spirituality. Which actually makes the world a better place. The others, become champions of evil.

And that’s how it goes. Christian communities either become good, by abandoning Christianity’s superstitions and dogmas, and in result fade toward irrelevance, or they become the enemies of civil society. The latter, the Christianity of Keller, stifles human progress—including moral progress. Because you can’t question it. Not really. You are condemned if you question too much. Or take your questions too seriously, unmollified by the bullshit answers they give you to try and shut you up. And that which cannot be questioned, can never advance. That’s why Christian churches are hemorrhaging membership hand-over-fist, especially youth, rather than progressing to less evil forms. They can’t change. Consequently, they either dissolve, or they become hardened bastions of evil dressed up as righteousness, where the worst people flock to find a faith that rationalizes their every prejudice and desire for social control. Historically, how Christianity stood in the way of the abolition of slavery and the liberation of women for a hundred and more years are paradigmatic examples; this is simply seeing a repeat in its opposition to LGBTQ rights and its continuing attempt to control women’s bodies.

Saying that “of course” churches should get to expel members doesn’t answer this criticism. Because the criticism isn’t that they aren’t accepting “everyone.” The criticism is that they are excluding too many. Too many to be worth joining in the first place. Like whites-only country clubs. Why join a church that condemns your friends and family, and countless people you know to be kind and honest? The problem with Christianity is not that it excludes the cruel and dishonest. The problem is that it keeps inventing excuses to exclude the kind and honest. Christianity as a movement doesn’t actually care about kindness and honesty. That’s all talk. What it really cares about is oppressing the freedom of anyone who disagrees with its fossilized prejudices. And that is why Christianity sucks. And why fewer and fewer people want to be a Christian anymore.

Bizarrely, like many a blind man in Church leadership today, Keller thinks the solution is to get even more Biblical (e.g. pp. 45-47). To defend more supernaturalism, more traditionalism, more commitment to the weirdo worldview of the Bible, with its magic and demons and spirits and every other bit of nonsense. He is too blind to see, that that’s exactly what is destroying the Church. The Bible is bullshit. And people are starting to finally notice that. And there’s nothing left to stop them. Going more Biblical only reminds them of how barbaric and primitive, how inhuman and out of date the entire religion is. Going more biblical is like grabbing the broom and beating your congregants right out of the Church yourself. “Hey, but we are roping in the Third World with our commitment to traditional supernaturalism,” as Keller seriously tries to argue, is not a defense of his religion. It’s an admission of its doomed folly.

Meanwhile, the rest of us don’t care about arguing whether demons exist or if Cane murdered Abel or blood magic makes us immortal, or whether gays should be executed because God said they should. That’s all false. And we know it. We care about what is being done to make the world a better place. Who is solving poverty? Who is solving homelessness? Who is building social safety nets for everyone? Who is reducing crime? Who is making communities and individuals happier and more empowered, free of the shackles of prejudices and ingrained assumptions? Who is being honest? Who is caring about ending ongoing harms? And in pursuing all of these aims…Who is in touch with reality?

Not Christianity.

And that’s the problem.

Morality Sans Authority

As an example of what I mean, Keller laments that “the popular concept—that we should each determine our own morality—is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world” (p. 47). That sentence is unintelligible. No, Dr. Keller, people do not think we should each determine our own morality because of anything they think about the spiritual realm. Most people think jack all about the spiritual realm. Either because they are smart and honest enough to admit they can’t make assertions about something they can’t test and thus can’t know anything about—or they learn enough to realize there is no credible probability of there even being any spiritual realm. Either way, “the rest of the world” is all there is.

The Kellers of the world want to terrify women who get abortions, make them feel miserable, scare them at clinics, even throw them in jail, while we want to help them with their trying times, to help them avoid getting into those dire straights, but also compassionately rescuing them when they still do. We care about the feelings of the person who exists and feels. Not of the person who doesn’t exist and comprehends nothing of what little it even suffers. We care about actual people. Not the fake people your religion superstitiously made up. And that’s why your superstitious religion causes you to endorse and finance evil: in fighting a war against a non-existent crime, you make millions of lives worse and miserable. All because of your religion. That’s what’s wrong with it.

Once again, Keller is blind to the reality of what he’s being told. The reason people say to him things that he hears as “we should each determine our own morality,” is not really a rejection of there being any true place to land morally; it is, rather, the realization that it is better when each person discovers why they should be moral, and thus discovers what sort of person they really want to be, than to tell them “how” they must be and not to question why—or worse, tell them lies in answer—and then judge them failures when they don’t comply with the ill-conceived dictates you imposed on them. Dictates derived from an ancient, ignorant, superstitious past; or molded by irrational prejudices and pseudopsychology.

A person who works out on their own why lying or racism or slavery are evil, and can adduce all the evidence they need for that conclusion from observations of the actual real world, is going to be much more committed to doing what’s right than someone who is merely told that God approves of slavery (as in fact he does; no other position is to be found anywhere in Keller’s Bible) and therefore it must be moral, and then told that that can never be questioned lest you be expelled or condemned a heretic. As Supertramp nailed it:

…watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,

a liberal, oh, fanatical, a criminal.

Won’t you sign up your name? We’d like to feel you’re acceptable,

respectable, oh, presentable, a vegetable!

I discussed this already in my refutation of Divine Command Theory: better people are made not by stuffing a false superstition down their throat, but by teaching them the skills to figure out on their own what a better way to behave is. Because then they’ll understand why. And the why, won’t be anything to do with angry storm gods or magic curses. It will have to do with people, with self-understanding, with consequences that are empirically verifiable.

Keller, of course, is still defending a dead worldview, born of ancient primitive ignorance. That’s why he says such eyerolling things like this (p. 48):

If you want the “freedoms” of love—the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings—you must limit your freedom in many ways. You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life. To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy.

Really, that’s not even true. And even in any sense that it is true, it’s a fallacy to conclude that because I can empirically confirm that, for example, I need to trade portions of my time and emotional labor, for the time and emotional labor of anyone else (rather than simply demanding or expecting it and giving nothing in turn), that therefore I should buy the entire moral slate of Keller’s cult, and therefore condemn abortion, nonmonogamy, homosexuality, and every other stupid thing his religion says. But really, he’s already on the wrong track with the premise. Free trade is not “limiting freedom.” It’s exercising it.

This is as true of money and economic labor, as it is of any other goods you exchange with anyone else—emotional labor and availability, cooperation toward common goals, time and reliability, anything else. Literally, anything else. If you are forced to give those things because you are told you are just “supposed” to, and not because you are freely negotiating them in exchange for the same or other gifts in return, then you are not free. You are oppressed. You are trapped. You are imprisoned. Instead, when you admit that obligations stemming from love and friendship are freely negotiated, things you freely offer in exchange for things freely bestowed, you will realize this means every agreement can be renegotiated. That’s what it means to be free. And this entails a lot of options the Kellers of the world would revile from in horror. Love just isn’t what they think it is (see my whole chapter on it in Sense and Goodness without God, III.10.3, pp. 170-202).

Christianity oppresses freedom, by forcing everyone to conform to the same mold of social expectations, rather than recognizing individuality, and setting everyone free, empowering them with the tools of honesty and kindness to explore any arrangement that works for them and those their lives affect. Instead, Christianity compels monogamy. It compels sexual austerity. It compels heteronormativity. It compels conformity. It compels unrewarded sacrifice. It compels a commitment to suppress the freedoms of others. All because of ancient superstitions conjured out of primitive ignorance.

Hence nothing Keller says even addresses the problem he’s being told his religion inescapably has. None of what he says answers the objection, for example… What does “not being gay” have to to with loving God? A love that constrains too much is abusive. It is then no longer really love; it’s then simply an abuse of power, a desire to control, to assuage your childish fear of change and difference by trying to compel the world to conform to your image—rather than it being a respect and admiration for who a person is, and what they need to be happy, and wanting to cooperate with them toward that end. That isn’t the love Keller is offering from his God. And who wants that abusive crap? Why even sell it?

Keller’s twisted and disturbing view of love is exactly why Christianity is being abandoned by the young adults of our era. Keller doesn’t get what love even is.

Curing the Sins of Christendom

Keller now tries to tackle the problem that Christendom has been consistently so awful for thousands of years, it doesn’t look like anyone could honestly recommend it. He writes (p. 52):

So we have to address the behavior of Christians—individual and corporate—that has undermined the plausibility of Christianity for so many people. Three issues stand out. First, there is the issue of Christians’ glaring character flaws. If Christianity is the truth, why are so many non-Christians living better lives than the Christians? Second, there is the issue of war and violence. If Christianity is the truth, why has the institutional church supported war, injustice, and violence over the years? Third, there is the issue of fanaticism. Even if Christian teaching has much to offer, why would we want to be together with so many smug, self-righteous, dangerous fanatics?

One part of this, Keller’s concern that “If Christianity is all it claims to be, shouldn’t Christians on the whole be much better people than everyone else?” (p. 53), I have already addressed in this series; likewise the fact that as a net whole, Christendom has pretty much always been a force for evil. But now he wants to confront those horrors—and try to explain his way around them.

Keller relies here on a fallacy of false analogy, saying that just as hospitals are only for the diseased, so churches are just hospitals for the diseased (p. 54). But that doesn’t work as an analogy. If Christianity doesn’t make people statistically better than not being Christian, then Christianity has no actual moral effect on society. If, worse, Christians are statistically more cruel or dishonest than secular humanists, the latter is then the cure for the disease…and Christianity is then the disease! So none of Keller’s excuses solve anything (e.g. pp. 55-56). If Christianity has no effect on the violence of societies, what use is it? None. To fix his false analogy, Christianity is like a hospital, that never cures any disease. Which honest people call a scam.

Similarly, Keller tries to distance himself from the Christians “who are fanatics” by claiming they “are so not because they are too committed to the gospel but because they’re not committed to it enough” (p. 57). Which sounds lovely in theory. But doesn’t fit practice. A lot of the time the Bible actually backs them, not you, Dr. Keller. The Bible actually condemns sluts and gays—to death even. The Bible actually says women are to be silent and subordinate to men. Nearly every fanatical thing “fanatical Christians” advocate, is what the Bible actually commands of them, or plainly endorses, somewhere within its pages. And what the Bible says that can be used against the fanatics, often argues against people like Keller.

For example, I suspect Keller would be appalled to admit that Jesus condemned any and all public prayer (Matthew 6:5-6); that he condemned any taking of God’s name in vain—like putting it on our money (Matthew 22:19-21) or swearing oaths by him, which Jesus said amounted to serving Satan (Matthew 5:33-37); that he commanded radical submission to all enemies: commanding Keller not to resist any thief, murderer, or enslaver, and to never refuse to give anything anyone asks of him (Matthew 5:39-42), which behavior would have made Keller a pauper by now, if he actually believed in being “committed enough” to the gospel (Matthew 19:21-25). Likewise, I’m sure to Keller’s horror, the Gospel is Marxist, not Capitalist (Acts 4:34-35; Matthew 6:25-33).

In short, even Keller doesn’t know what commitment to the gospel actually entails. He just makes up his own gospel, pretends it’s in the Bible, and hopes no one notices. Just like every other Christian in history. Which is what’s wrong with it. If it just becomes anything anyone makes up, it is not likely ever to be good or useful. It will simply rationalize any ignorance, prejudice, and superstition the believer clings to. True, commitment to the actual gospel is a terrible idea; it’s principles were crafted by superstitious ignorant people who had no idea how social systems work. But the solution is to chuck the whole religion as an outdated, bad idea. And replace it with something we can demonstrate from evidence actually works. Which is what Secular Humanism is about.

So by the time in this book when Keller asks, “What is the answer, then, to the very fair and devastating criticisms of the record of the Christian church?” and then concludes, “The answer is not to abandon the Christian faith, because that would leave us with neither the standards nor the resources to make correction[s]” (p. 62), he has presented exactly zero evidence that that conclusion is true. All the evidence in fact establishes that it is false. The correct answer is indeed to abandon the Christian faith, precisely so we can find the standards and resources that will actually work. You must escape the made-up pseudoscientific nonsense, before you can start re-filling your thus-cleared mind with the conclusions of an actual evidence-based process of discovery. Christianity is a weight around society’s neck. It is only by casting it off, that people can finally be free to find the truth.

This does not mean they will. You can free yourself of one ignorant worldview only to become trapped in another. So it takes more than just getting rid of the weight of a false worldview. But you cannot find the true worldview, if you never cast off a false one. So that is an essential step. The rest, requires commitment to reason, evidence, and a full broadening of experience. But Christianity gets in the way of that first step. Keller himself is trying to block people from taking it, with this very book. He’s like the ghost of the wicked preacher in the movie Poltergeist, trying to trick the dead from finding a better world, with all his promises and handwaving. Literally blocking the light from their view.

The evidence-based morality offered by secular humanism, is obviously the correct solution to all the evils Christendom has inspired. Just like evidence-based medicine over faith healing has proved to be; and evidence-based knowledge over any reliance on divine revelation; and evidence-based government over any theocracy or “biblical law” there ever was.

Hell: The Ultimate Evil

Hell is an indefensible doctrine. It establishes as evil any Christianity that requires belief in it. This has been thoroughly demonstrated already by Keith Parsons in The End of Christianity (Chapter 10). Here I’ll just answer Keller’s disturbing defense of hell.

Keller is right to be concerned, that “any Christian who thinks that there are people bound for hell must perceive such people as unequal in dignity and worth” (p. 69); and therefore “divine judgment is one of Christianity’s most offensive doctrines” (p. 76). Yep. Of course Keller has no real defense. He just insists “that the doctrine of God’s final judgment is a necessary undergirding for human practices of love and peacemaking.” He gives exactly no evidence that that’s true. In fact, it is obviously refuted, by all the love and peacemaking accomplished without it. So really, I have to count this as another example of Keller simply lying.

Indeed, studies show, the more a society is based on his concept, the more evils that society becomes burdened by: murder rates, crime rates, rates of poverty and mortality and teen pregnancy and abortion and drug addiction and STD’s, even self-reported unhappiness, all go up, in societies that embrace what Keller insists undergirds a good society. While societies that abandon that undergirding, are far better off, on all those measures and more (see all the science cited in TEC, p. 421 n. 10). Evidence-based reasoning leads to only one conclusion: Keller’s doctrine of hell is inherently evil; and when embraced, only makes society worse. The exact opposite of what people like him claim.

Keller’s claim doesn’t even address the issue anyway: that if Christians must believe the wisest and most moral and knowledgeable and kind being that exists deems me so wretched and evil I deserve eternal torture, how can they think any better of me, when in doing so, they would be going against the very judgment of the best and wisest of judges? The result is necessarily a conclusion that I am vile, and deserving of everything vile. You cannot believe I deserve mercy and kindness, and at the same time deserve the eternal absence of mercy and kindness. Christianity that retains any belief in hell thus becomes either self-contradictory, or a furnace of hate. There is no other outcome possible for it.

Even Christianities that abandon belief in hell, don’t really improve much on that measure. Killing someone may be more merciful than eternally torturing them; but it’s still murder. So it remains a contradiction to believe I deserve mercy and kindness, and at the same time deserve to be murdered. The only moral belief Christians could maintain here, is that everyone goes to heaven, and anyone who is for their evil ways unfit to, will be fixed en route so they’ll be a good person again once there. As any omnipotent god could do, and as any morally admirable god would do. Of course, a real god of such kind would have fixed those people from the start; there would be no one insane or irrational enough to behave in any manner any of us should fear. That would have been designed out of us before we were even born, and certainly before we reached adulthood.

But once Christians become universalists….well, then they aren’t really Christians anymore. Because there is then absolutely no use for Christianity. It doesn’t make people better; and it isn’t needed to get them into heaven.

Keller can’t have that. So he needs hell. Because without it, the whole political sham he is defending crumbles. And since there is exactly zero evidence any such place exists, and exactly zero evidence regarding who actually goes there, he can’t really make what anyone would call sound arguments. He can only make indefensible assertions, and hope no one notices he hasn’t even presented a single argument for any of those assertions being true. Worse, he doesn’t just make shit up. But his solution to his problem is once again to defend evil. Thus demonstrating the moral bankruptcy of Christianity, which can only be believed by people compelled thereby to endorse evil as the greatest good (as I demonstrated already in the previous installment of this series).

Keller starts with the usual apologetic bullshit, that “hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity” (p. 78). That’s bullshit empirically, of course—because he just made it up, and no evidence exists to establish any such belief. But it’s also bullshit Biblically. It is not what Keller’s own God says: that we will be cast bodily into hell (Matthew 5:29-30), and suffer unquenchable fire and undying worms there eternally (Mark 9:43-48), and on account of that weep and gnash our teeth in misery (Matthew 13:42), forever. Luke even has Jesus present himself as the most evil being in the universe, declaring that absolutely no mercy or relief from those horrific flames will ever transpire, even when those suffering them beg for a mere drop of water (Luke 16:23-25). Nowhere, ever, does the Bible say hell is just merely not getting to hang out with God.

Keller can’t escape admitting that hell is either a totally cool place to end up—because tons of nice people will be there, living forever, and thus able to create any wonderful community they wanted—and therefore not a punishment; or hell is evil, the vilest conceivable punishment, even for criminals, much less the countless billions of innocents Keller’s creed entails will end up there. That’s true even if it doesn’t involve fire and worms. Merely solitary confinement, for instance, is the grossest of evils, even for just a few years, much less an eternity. There is a reason it is widely recognized as criminal by sane societies. This is worse than murder. But murdering non-Christians merely for not being Christians is also evil.

There is no possible way to make hell moral. Other than turning it into heaven. And there is no possible way to excuse God for allowing people to suffer in hell, or even allowing them to die, when he can save them from either fate by placing them in a tolerable world to live in—as literally any real god could do, and any admirable god would do. This nonsense about hell consisting only of being “apart from God” is 100% bullshit. We can be quite happy without God around—especially the evil monstrous God Keller believes in. Indeed, we’d rather not have that god around. So he can either not be awful and bring us all into heaven; or he can give us a world to live in forever and make our own—and then leave us the fuck alone. Anything else, just establishes God’s cred as Full On Fucking Evil; and anyone who worships him, a servant of evil.

Nevertheless, Keller’s lies continue, as he makes shit up over and over again, weaving more mythology and pseudopsychology about hell, claiming, for example, that “No one ever asks to leave hell,” a statement that isn’t even remotely plausible, much less supported by any evidence whatever. It’s 100% bullshit. The height of ridiculous, what evidence does Keller cite in support of this nonsense? The fact that in the fake story of Lazarus, the man who didn’t help Lazarus, and for that petty crime goes to eternal torment, doesn’t ask to leave hell. Seriously. A fake story made up by Luke, put in the mouth of a fake Jesus, a total fiction, wholly implausible, and based on no evidence whatever, from human psychology generally or actual prisoners of hell specifically—but instead simply reflecting the beliefs of the writer that are so foul, so vile, that even Keller can’t accept it’s literally true.

That’s Keller’s evidence. This is why Christianity is bullshit.

And yes, even Keller can’t choke down his own evil Bible on this point. Keller tries to insist that surely the fire and burning and horror is all metaphor for something—even though we well know, per above, the Gospels uniformly portray hell as a real physical place with real physical fire; Luke included. But even in Keller’s fantasy, where hell is something more like an isolation tank in federal prison you never get to leave, already a form of horrific torture, Jesus still refuses to give even the tiniest relief to the suffering there. In Keller’s own fantasy Jesus is still the most evil being in the universe. Even in this, Keller’s made-up “nice” version of the story—the one that isn’t anywhere in the Bible. The one that’s actually in the Bible, is just worse.

So really, even Keller is repulsed by what the Jesus of the Gospels believes, so much so he even denies that that Jesus existed, and insists some other did, on no evidence whatever. Keller wants Jesus to have said and thus meant something else, something in fact he never says anywhere in the Bible. And yet even with his totally made-up, unbiblical, nicer Jesus, Keller still believes in the vileness of never showing any mercy to or ever helping someone escape a miserable predicament. Hell-based Christianity has turned Keller into this despicable, wicked man. A man who actually thinks this is good. And that’s why his brand of Christianity is evil.

Such a religion needs to go. It has no place in a civilized society.

Summary

To defend his religion and its evils, including its doctrine of hell, Keller thinks anyone who isn’t a Christian must be totally devoid of moral virtues and even sanity (p. 79). And therefore that’s why they deserve to be locked in solitary confinement, without a single drop of mercy, for infinite years. That his religion forces him to think of us this way is what makes his religion horrific and despicable. Because the fact that this is what he has to think of the occupants of hell, who did nothing but just not believe a creed, is horrific and despicable.

The absurdity of Keller’s primitive, superstitious, contradictory worldview is summed up, inadvertently, in his own words (p. 82):

I now ask, what makes them think God is Love? Can they look at life in the world today and say, “This proves that the God of the world is a God of love”? Can they look at history and say, “This all shows that the God of history is a God of love”? Can they look at the religious texts of the world and conclude that God is a God of love? By no means is that the dominant, ruling attribute of God as understood in any of the major faiths. I must conclude that the source of the idea that God is Love is the Bible itself. And the Bible tells us that the God of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world to rights in the end.

Here we have him admitting there is no evidence whatever that any God of love exists…yet the Bible still says there is one, so he concludes there still must be. Except, the Bible describes an even more evil and horrific God than anyone needs to explain our observations of the world. So even his only evidence—which is not even evidence but an ancient, barbaric collection of myths—doesn’t support his own wish that there be some evidence, any drop of evidence, that God isn’t the total evil fuck all the evidence, even of Keller’s own Bible, entails he is.

Keller closes with a silly parable about cookies (p. 81), claiming Christianity is like knowledge that a cookie is poisonous, and non-Christianity is like insanely refusing to believe that and eating it anyway, and thus deserving to die. What a horrible worldview. Utterly despicable. The truth is, Christians are on the wrong side of this parable. Christianity is the poison cookie. And Christians are the ones delusionally refusing to believe that, despite thousands of years of evidence that it has never been needed for anything good, and always comes with various measures of bad. Among them, the fact that it turns good people into champions of evil, as has become of Keller.

In the end, Keller tries to insist hell is the consequence of love (p. 83). Sorry, Dr. Keller. But that’s, once again, 100% bullshit. And dangerous bullshit, too. Someone who loves you by definition could never torture you, or allow you to suffer, not even just by locking you in a lonely prison cell for billions and trillions of years. It would destroy them to even contemplate it. So Keller’s idea of love is twisted and fucked up. And any religion that fucks up your idea of love so badly that it has become the cruelest, most merciless thing imaginable, is a religion that can only propagate misery in any society that embraces it. I established earlier here that Keller doesn’t know what love is. To him, love is brutality and barbarity, a cosmic concentration camp, the complete absence of any kindness or mercy—or even actual justice.

Dr. Keller, please escape this hell you have made for yourself. And please stop trying to trap more Christians in it with you. Because what you are saying, is, in fact, the absolute opposite of love. And it will only ruin our world.

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Next I’ll discuss Keller’s Chapter 6 (that link will go live later this month), in which he tries defending Christianity against all the science that says it’s as likely as magic crystals.