Let’s face it. Jesus is a dick. The Gospels portray him as a cruel, sociopathic asshole who gloats over millions being horribly tortured for billions of years at his command (Mk. 9:43-49, Mt. 13:40-42, Mt. 13:49-50, Mt. 18:7-9, Mt. 24:51, Mt. 25:40-46, Mt. 5:22,...
The best thing about this film is that it lies to the audience. Because we live in the age of the Internet. So anyone who ever thinks to fact-check it will find out they’ve been lied to. And that may do more damage to their faith than any atheist they may ever...
What do you get when you combine atheism, mathematics, evolutionary psychology, and the science of cognitive biases? Critical thinking skills! I discuss many aspects of this in my online course on critical thinking. (It’s easy, useful, and affordable, so...
A reader pointed something out to me that was a fantastic facepalm moment. It’s another demonstration of how Bart Ehrman doesn’t know how epistemic probability works, and not only hasn’t read On the Historicity of Jesus, he doesn’t even know...
On the matter of the historicity of Jesus, Bart Ehrman has replied to what I recently summarized about the problems with Paul’s reference to brothers of the Lord in the Epistles. In Carrier and James the Brother of the Jesus (already distorting his facts in the...
I once wrote about how we aren’t really doomed, per se. Things could get bad, even really bad, owing to climate change and irrational energy and environmental policies, even economic crashes, even war, even worldwide NBC war. But it won’t be an apocalypse....
The Mythinformation Con Historicity of Jesus debate last Friday was disappointing to many. To be fair to Robert Price, he is in failing health. And he’s a sweet guy. But I have to be honest. Even granting that, he didn’t respond to hardly anything Ehrman...
It’s been a really long time since I’ve bothered with the literature in resurrection apologetics. It mostly just bores me now. Nothing new has ever arisen since my best summary treatment in The Christian Delusion. But there is now something new and...
Susan Haack is generally a good philosopher (I interviewed her a few years ago). She’s made important strides in unifying disparate positions in epistemology (and I am very fond of unification efforts in philosophy: I think they are generally on the right track,...
Way back in 2012 Matthew Ferguson published Leveling a Mountain of Manuscripts with a Small Scoop of Context, and it long reminded me of how non-experts can be manipulated by Christian apologists, because laypeople don’t know basic things about paleography that...
The deep anxiety of Christians is often revealed in their desperation to convince themselves they aren’t just new fangled pagans who stole everything from other religions. The virgin birth is a classic example, and the fact-challenged ill-logic of trying to deny...
Editor, physician and documentarian Lena Einhorn has written a book, A Shift in Time, arguing a new theory of the historical Jesus: that he actually was a violent rebel from the era of Claudius, who was later whitewashed into a pacifist from the era of Tiberius. My...
Christian apologist Randal Rauser has written a book every atheist should be ready to cite. Not only because it’s important to keep on hand examples of Christians acting like actual Christians (why can’t there be more of that??). But also because, on one...
For the most up-to-date collection of evidence in my case, demonstrating these accusations are indeed false, now see my summary and links to court documents from June of 2018. -:- In June of 2016, Amy Frank accused me of sexual assault and sexual harassment at a house...
Rene Salm has clued me in to another important new peer reviewed journal article, by Tom Dykstra (M.Div.; Ph.D. in Russian History), who is best known for his critically acclaimed book on how the Gospel of Mark is built out of the Epistles of Paul (Mark, Canonizer of...
I mentioned a couple days ago the John Tors travesty, an outraged attempt to “rebut” the Macleans article questioning the historicity of Jesus. His ignorance is only exceeded by his arrogance. And it’s all just so sad to behold....
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.