You can now pre-order the final volume of the Loftus trilogy, in print or kindle, which includes two chapters by me, and awesome chapters by many other excellent scholars. The previous two volumes were The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (building on The God Delusion with entries by experts on various of its subjects) and The End of Christianity (building on The End of Faith with entries by experts on various of its subjects). They were excellent collections, featuring the work of over a dozen different experts, brought together and edited by John Loftus. Now the final entry has arrived: Christianity Is Not Great: How Faith Fails (building on God Is Not Great with entries by experts on various of its subjects).
To see a summary of what’s in the earlier volumes, see my past blogs on “The Christian Delusion” (2010) and “The End of Christianity” (2011).
What’s new in Christianity Is Not Great? Oh, it’s great…
I have two chapters in it that you’ll probably love to have. In both I apply my skills as a historian and my knowledge of antiquity to questions of later periods, citing and relying on primary evidence and experts in those periods.
The first of those is “Christianity and the Rise of American Democracy” in which I reproduce and expand on my previous speech on the subject, generating my best essay (with even more references) proving the point that the Constitution was not inspired by the Bible but was in fact an overt attack against it, using what were in fact pagan ideas and values, in aid of suppressing the pernicious influence of biblical values and ideas on government. I likewise show how the Ten Commandments are almost entirely hostile to the most cherished of American values and ideals, those very values and ideals that so many people claim define us as a “great nation.”
My second chapter is simply called “The Dark Ages” and in it I extensively quote experts (including archaeologists) demonstrating that there really was a Dark Age, it really did suck in every conceivable way, and Christianity was indeed responsible for causing and sustaining it. Just to titillate you I’ll quote it’s closing paragraph (you’ll have to read the chapter to find out what it is talking about and how I come to this conclusion):
That’s why Christianity alone was wholly incapable of ending the Dark Ages and returning Western society back to its former and future glory. Only when those old-time pagan values were reinjected into the Christian system did it ever find the means to change this dire state of things. We’d have been better off just having the pagan system from the start. Instead, Christianity dragged us down into the sewers of dystopia, and kept us there, and forced us to endure a long crawl back out, setting us back more than a thousand years on nearly every cultural and intellectual measure of human existence.
In the chapter I tackle head-on every standard objection raised against this assessment (even by some medievalists).
-:-
But that’s not all that’s in TNG. It’s our largest book yet, a hundred pages more than TCD and TEC. Chock full of chapters you definitely will want to read or use or cite at people.
John Loftus himself writes on “Religious Violence and the Harms of Christianity,” introducing the whole book and its aims and conclusions, and surveying some of the literature on the connection between religion and violence, and other harmful effects. He also contributes three more chapters, in which he summarizes the most recent mainstream scholarship on three subjects: “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live: The Wicked Christian Witch Hunts,” “The Slave Is the Owner’s Property: Christianity and the Savagery of Slavery,” and “Doth God Take Care for Oxen? Christianity’s Acrimony against Animals.” Each is an excellent and cite-worthy survey of how Christianity shares a lot of blame for three pervasive social evils that have wracked Western society. If you want a one-stop shop for these kinds of arguments, this is the place to start.
Anthropologist David Eller contributes two chapters equally well worth having on hand for the same reason. First is an expert analysis of the role of Christianity in promoting violence throughout history, in “Love Your Enemy, Kill Your Enemy: Crusades, Inquisitions, and Centuries of Christian Violence.” Second requires no further description: “They Will Make Good Slaves and Christians: Christianity, Colonialism, and the Destruction of Indigenous People.”
Of the same use, in the current social and political sphere, especially in the realm of medical ethics, lawyer Ron Lindsay writes on “The Christian Abuse of the Sanctity of Life.” Veronica Drantz provides an excellent summary of facts regarding Christianity’s (and many other religion’s) role in perpetuating bigotry toward and oppression and abuse of the LGBTI community, in “The Gender Binary and LGBTI People: Religious Myth and Medical Malpractice.” Complementing that, Annie Laurie Gaylor writes about “Woman, What Have I to Do with Thee? Christianity’s War against Women.”
Psychologists Marlene Winell and Valerie Tarico summarize the evidence that Christianity exacerbates harms to mental health and to the mentally ill in “The Crazy-Making in Christianity: A Look at Real Psychological Harm.” They are backed by the analysis of Nathan Phelps, who surveys the sickening reality of “Abusive Pastors and Churches.” And physician Harriet Hall covers a broad spectrum of how Christian faith meddles with sound medical and health behavior in “Christianity Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.” William R. Patterson surveys Christianity’s role in promoting the destruction of the environment in his simply named chapter “Christianity and the Environment.”
Our own Ed Brayton covers the whole gamut of “The Christian Right and the Culture Wars.” And sexual psychology expert Darrel Ray surveys Christianity’s harms in its backward attitudes surrounding sex and sexuality in “Secular Sexuality: A Direct Challenge to Christianity.” The late Victor Stenger’s last publication is also in this book, “The Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Christianity,” a very useful and concise summary of a lot of his recent work on the subject, debunking the idea that Christianity is totes compatible with an honest and unfettered pursuit of science. Similarly, Peter Boghossian articulates the dangers, and thus harms, produced and risked by faith-based thinking of any sort, in “Faith, Epistemology, and Answering Socrates’ Question by Translation.”
The book closes with a valuable pushback, three chapters explaining why all these harms of Christianity can be alleviated by getting rid of religion altogether. Jonathan Pearce covers the subject of “‘Tu Quoque, Atheism?’—Our Right to Judge.” Philosopher James Lindsay forcefully argues “Only Humans Can Solve the Problems of the World.” And Russell Blackford summarizes the basic idea of “Living without God.” Also included earlier in the book is a speech by Robert G. Ingersoll that shockingly is still wholly applicable today, over a hundred years later, “The Failure of the Church and the Triumph of Reason.”
There is so much that is of use in this book. It is definitely what you want on hand whenever you want to argue that Christianity has not been a force for good in the world, but has been and still is a Pandora’s box of endless and despicable evils.
Ooooh, this does look great! Thank you for writing and sharing!
My conversation on a light rail train this evening – Monday, Oct. 13, 2014:
Stranger: “Live long and prosper.”
Me: “Why did you say that?”
“Your star trek logo pin.”
“That’s not the Star Trek logo. It’s the atheist A.”
“Why do you not believe in god?”
“There’s no evidence for his existence.”
“No evidence? What about trees?”
“Biochemistry that evolved from simpler forms; it requires no bearded man in the clouds.”
“What about the sky?”
“Clouds of atoms shaped by electromagnetism.”
“But where did the atoms come from?”
“They have always been here.”
“No, there has to have been a god to create atoms.”
“So where did god come from?”
“He’s always been here.”
“Then why can’t atoms have always been here without a supernatural human?”
“Nothing can exist without a creator.”
“That’s not true. Have you ever actually seen anyone make something out of nothing? We humans just reshape atoms into new forms. Electromagnetism also shapes things into new forms without human or superhuman intervention.”
“How do you explain life?”
“Have you ever read a science book? It’s biochemistry. It happens naturally without human or superhuman intervention. Read Miller and Brown, or try their experiment yourself.”
“Experiment?”
“Would you agree that glass is made of heated sand, and sand is pulverized rock, and rock is not a living thing?”
“Yes.”
“A glass beaker made from sand made from pulverized rock is not a living thing?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Methane gas is not a living thing? Nor is ammonia gas or water vapor?”
“No, they aren’t living.”
“And lightning is not a living thing?”
“Right.”
“Lightning is an electrical flash, right?
“I guess so.”
“So…the Miller-Brown experiment. Fill a sterilized glass beaker with methane, ammonia, and water, introduce an electric charge just like lightning, and it forms gobs and gobs of DNA. All life is formed from DNA.”
“So?”
“So, science has repeatedly shown by observation and experiment that earth’s early atmosphere was methane, ammonia, water vapor, and electricity. They chemically reacted with each other to form gobs of DNA from which all life forms evolved.”
“DNA forms in the shape of a cross, showing the influence of god and Jesus.”
“DNA forms in a double helix, not a cross.”
“Well, lots of things in nature are shaped like a cross.”
“Yes. I can even form my fingers into a cross. But I can also form my fingers into a circle, like the one surrounding my atheist A logo, or into an A for atheist, or a C or a V or a W, and into a lot of other shapes. What does that prove? Cross shapes don’t prove a god. And man, not god, made the original cross on which the Romans supposedly crucified your Jesus.”
“But there has to be a god.”
“Why does there have to be a god?”
“To have made all this happen all of the sudden.”
“But it didn’t happen all of the sudden. We now know, from Alfven (and those who have built on his Nobel prize winning work), that there are huge structures in space, galaxies clustered together and then the clusters clustered together, structures that are more than a trillion light years across. Electromagnetism shaped the universe at all levels (from atoms to galaxies) out of plasma clouds of matter, into its present structures, over a span of trillions of years. It’s not like one second there was nothing and the next second all the present structures of the universe were here.”
“Only god can create life.”
“Also not true. I changed methane, ammonia, water, and electricity into DNA in a high school lab, and I’m not a deity. And again, if only god can create life, and god is a living being, who or what created the living being you call god?”
“He has always been here.”
“Atoms have always been here. Humans can see and measure atoms, and measure their age. Matter can change into energy and energy into matter, but the combined sum total of matter and energy cannot be increased or decreased by even one atom of matter or one watt of energy; it has all always been here in one form or another, and always will be here in one form or another, transforming over millions and billions and trillions of years, all without a creator. There can’t have been a creator, since we now know that the sum total of matter and energy cannot be increased or decreased, not by a god nor by anyone or anything else. But humans cannot see or measure god and nobody has shown us credible evidence that there is or ever was a deity, a creator in human form.”
“There has to be a god.”
“Why? Because your parents and your minister told you so, and they have never and would never and could never have lied to you, or simply have been mistaken?”
“There’s no other explanation.”
“Yes there is. Even if you reject science, which is the most logical explanation and most consistent with the evidence, the ancients had other explanations. For example, giant turtles balance the earth, moon, and stars on their backs. No gods in human form, just huge turtles. So there are lots of possible explanations besides science, or a god in human form living in earth’s clouds.”
“You can’t convince me there’s no god.”
“Too bad. I have given you a lot of scientific evidence, and encouraged you to read science books to understand why religion makes no sense to me, why it is inconsistent with what our senses and our instruments tell us about the universe, and why and how science offers far more logical explanations. I’m telling you to read Darwin, read Einstein, read Newton, read Sagan, read Miller and Brown, read Dawkins and Hitchens and Ingersoll on atheism, read Alfven about electromagnetism and plasma clouds, read Mendel about genetics, and try to understand why and how science offers better explanations than religion does. I’ve offered you all of this and more. In return, all you have given me is ‘there has to be a god’ and ‘nothing can have existed without a god except god his own self.’ Anyway, it honestly makes no difference to me whether you believe in a god or not. But it seems to really bother you that I don’t, even though you can’t offer me even one logical reason why I should.”
“Well, this is my stop. Good bye and god bless you.”
I would love to read your essay on the dark ages. I guess the rest of the book will come as a bonus.
Just as a side issue, I’m afraid I have a bee in my bonnet about the first person plural in history writing. I think it obscures actual agents of historical change as well as the effect on the direct recipients … Just a thought.
Thanks for the mention, Richard!
Look forward to getting my contributor’s copy.
Hi Dr. Carrier, I stumbled to your work about a month ago and I would like to express my thanks to you. It liberated my mind especially your book Sense and Goodness w/o God. I’m looking forward to reading this collaborative work especially your contributions and the chapter about Christianity’s abuse on LGBT community. It sickens me that some people would choose to kill living breathing human beings just because of their sexual orientation. http://youtu.be/1df_i26wh-w
After reading so much mythicist books including yours, I finally realized how crappy Christianity was. It doesn’t change the fact that Jesus wants men to be castrated to go to heaven (Matthew 19:12) or cut of your body parts if you sin (Matthew 5:29-30) no matter how apologists sugar coat it. Or how Jesus would want you to become a hateful vagabond (Matthew 10:21-23, 10:34-39, Luke 14:26-27) not to mention he’s kinda racist too (Matthew 15:22-28). In my argumets with Christians, I just bring up to them as to why there is no record of zombies rampaging Jerusalem (Matthew 27:51-53).
Good…err…God, this book sounds huge. I need to get this.
That does look like a book I want … and this is as good a place as any to say I just finished reading that large book of your own that came out recently and was fascinated by it.
… I’ll quote it’s closing paragraph …
… (and many other religion’s) …
At least Jesus never (that we have a record of) misused or misplaced apostrophes.
Well I’m looking forward to it, but being on an ultra-tight budget, I’ll have to wait until it shows up in my local library. 🙁
That said, I’ve just finished Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? and am going through his How Jesus Became God. The first one was awful, gross. Riddled with fallacies and rhetoric, and very short on substance. And even when he attacks crank mythicists, he couldn’t get his facts straight (case in point: the penis-nosed rooster-headed bust of The Saviour of the World). And he didn’t even mention Francesco Carotta, let alone Joseph Atwill! Attacking Atwill would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. He would have given Ehrman so much ammunition…. HJBG is a lot better; sometimes he argues just like a mythicist, and not a crank one, either.
Richard, forgive me if this is not the correct place to lodge my inquiry. I am currently engaged in a polite exchange of views over at Patheos, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2014/06/review-of-two-mythicist-books.html
when I got distracted by the following comment;
(“Also there is a an extra biblical reference to Jesus around 70-80 C.E from Mara Bar-Serapion.”) I noticed that you didn’t give it much time in your book, dating it 150CE+. I chased up a few other opinions on it and found nothing to credit the letter as an independent attestation for a historical Jesus. My correspondent then referred me to the following;
“Please read the results of a recent conference on Mara Bar-Serapion, published as “The letter of Mara bar Sarapion in context : proceedings of the symposium held at Utrecht University, 10-12 December 2009” For more information on this project see http://www.phil.uu.nl/hsfl/pro…”
I was just wondering if you know anything of this Symposium or its findings on the letter in question?
Thanks.
Hi Richard. Probably a dumb question… Any plans for this book to be released in Hardcover as well?
Looks like a great book. Just got my copy in the mail and I plan to argument map the best contents. I haven’t been able to find any serious criticism of the book yet aside from David Marshall’s review on Amazon. Heard of anything else?
No. But I haven’t looked. Would love to hear of any. I haven’t even looked at the Amazon ones (David Marshall ignorantly slagging off any atheist book published on Amazon is pretty much a staple, possibly ripe for a drinking game).