John W. Loftus earned M.A. and M.Div. degrees in theology and philosophy from Lincoln Christian Seminary under the guidance of Dr. James D. Strauss. He then attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he studied under Dr. William Lane Craig and received a Th.M. degree in philosophy of religion. Before leaving the church, he had ministries in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana, and taught at several Christian colleges. Today he still teaches as an adjunct instructor in philosophy at Kellogg Community College and has an online blog devoted to “debunking Christianity.” His new book is Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity.
In this interview with D.J. Grothe, John Loftus discusses his background as an Evangelical Christian preacher and apologist and what led to his rejection of the faith, including both emotional loss and “lovelessness in the church,” and also philosophical arguments and historical evidence that caused him to doubt. He critiques the Christian illusion of moral superiority. He challenges religion with what he calls the “outsider test.” He explores whether logic and reason led to his atheism, or followed only after he adopted an atheistic point of view for emotional reasons. And he explains what he does believe in now that he no longer believes in Christianity or God, and the benefits he thinks this new worldview brings him.
I discovered John Loftus’ blog http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/ only two weeks ago but keep coming back. He has a number of co-contributors, so there is always something thought provoking. For instance, the information about recovery retreats led by psychologist Marlene Winell who helps ‘refugees’ from fundamentalists sects to get their life back. So while the general title focusses on Christianity, a much wider net is cast.
The theological/philosophical part is well-worn to us here but I always find these biographies interesting, especially of defectors among the flock. Here’s what I found interesting-
“lovelessness” of the church. The irony being that seeing to one’s emotional/social/spiritual well-being is often trumpeted by believers in support of their church or religion. Further irony, Loftus may have just been in the wrong place. Lots of pedophile priests seem to have got plenty of love from their church authorities. Perhaps Mr. Loftus’ sin was insufficiently horrific to merit support.
Evolution. Lots and lots of moderate Christians and atheists alike tell you that evolution is no “real” threat to faith. Bull. Darwin really did cut some of Loftus’ faith strings and to think he is alone there is preposterous.
Good for you John Loftus, truly you are now doing the lord’s work.. so to speak.
Interesting blog, well-written with consise posts and links for followup. Provides access to multiple perspectives. I was intrigued that he posted a review of his book by a Christian website (and that the Christian website reviewed his book).
I found the interview dragged in spots—in the same way as some people have personal reasons for believing in God, he has personal reasons for not believing. But there is a lot of good thinking in the blog and having been educated in “Christian apologetics” Loftus knows the weak points of the arguments.
There are plenty of “targets” to shoot at within Christianity as well as amost any other form of organized faith, but the problem is with people, not faith per se. Jesus himself reserved his harshest criticism for those who felt themselves “most religious” within his society while pointing out their hypocrisy. Ultimately that group of religious leaders had him killed for his success with being so popular by saying such things - which somehow lead to thousands, millions, and ultimately billions of people professing that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of God… amazing.
Historical as well as current complaints against some people who call themselves Christians are of a similar nature in that Jesus would also condem them for what is ironically so much un-Christlike behavior. Would they not kill him yet again? (Somehow there’s often a “stake” of some kind involved with this behaviour, whether it involves burning or just hanging there.)
Real concepts such as the relationship between God and Man, Heaven and Hell are long lost for much of organized Christianity, having been buried in acres of dogma and doctrine by the too often self-serving “servants” of the church. What’s even more ironic? If you decry them, you might somehow actually manage to exhibit Christlike behaviour!
2 Corinthians 11:12-15 - There’s a real lesson here.
“Always remember, I am right and everyone else is wrong!”
Virtually identical apologetics, distinguishing the “true” belief from the adulterations of its followers are being made by adherents of many religions, all over the world. The problem is it presupposes that your Christian god and his incarnation Jesus of Nazareth are the real deal, not any of the 4500+ deities of other religions or none.
BTW, you are welcome to duke it out on John Loftus’ blog.
There are plenty of “targets” to shoot at within Christianity as well as amost any other form of organized faith, but the problem is with people, not faith per se. Jesus himself reserved his harshest criticism for those who felt themselves “most religious” within his society while pointing out their hypocrisy. Ultimately that group of religious leaders had him killed for his success with being so popular by saying such things - which somehow lead to thousands, millions, and ultimately billions of people professing that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of God… amazing.
You assume there ever was an actual new testament Jesus.. considering his life in the Bible is carbon-copy mythology from thousands of years before I find it dramatically unlikely there was ever really a Jesus, at least of the time and place the NT ascribes. Moreover, it isn’t “amazing” to me even if there was a Jesus. The success of Christianity is owed mostly to Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, & Steel”.. in other words, dumb luck mostly related to geography and regional biology. Christianity was spread at the tip of a conquerers sword, not by an irrepressibly valorous message. If Europe had been Muslim at the start of its imperialist period then Mohammad would be the hero.. whereas the messiahs of say, South American peoples are consigned to oblivion. It’s all pretty random, really.
Historical as well as current complaints against some people who call themselves Christians are of a similar nature in that Jesus would also condem them for what is ironically so much un-Christlike behavior. Would they not kill him yet again? (Somehow there’s often a “stake” of some kind involved with this behaviour, whether it involves burning or just hanging there.)
This sentiment is often expressed among skeptics and thoughtful theists but I still find stark the ignorance among believers of the fact. I would add to your observations that Jesus was rather anti-family, anti-nationalism and openly communistic. He seems like the polar opposite of your standard US god-fearing Christian. I even started an essay I’ve yet to finish but I titled it “Why Don’t Christians Hate America?”. It seems beyond debate that Jesus would have.
Robinson lets Christianity die out with a year 1000 plague and now the world gets conquered and developed by Muslims, Chinese, and to some degree Buddhists.
An allegory, yes, but an instructive one.
(I also love, and just re-read, his Mars Trilogy, and his trilogy about abrupt climate change).
Yes, the “winners” are free and inclined to rewrite history to reflect whatever they wish. As to the “recycling” of religions, why would God or man either one want to change a perfectly good story line? Do we assume automatically that all such tellings are not true for its own place and time?
We can’t prove “god” anymore than we can prove “non-god” except for the testimony of those who have and have not encountered such. Testimony alone fares well enough in most courts. It is possible that there are just as many people actually willing to testify that they know God exists as those who would testify that they know he does not. Would it have to be “sworn” testimony?
God makers Moses and Paul were both of a highly educated and extremely privileged class within their own societies. That stated, works such as theirs did not happen in a vacuum. Do we suppose that “the story” is complete when scientists have just figured that the creation of our universe most likely did actually begin with “darkness” before the “light”? Now how else could Moses have stated his own story of creation within a few lines while still very carefully explaining that “days” are therein being defined as periods of “light” and “dark” even before the stars, sun and moon were supposedly formed?
I might thereby ask the biblical literalists how anyone with half a brain can figure that the “days” of creation amounted to 24 hour periods when even the Jews who founded the Bible wouldn’t buy that story. So how many hours are in a day at the South Pole?
Yes, the “winners” are free and inclined to rewrite history to reflect whatever they wish. As to the “recycling” of religions, why would God or man either one want to change a perfectly good story line? Do we assume automatically that all such tellings are not true for its own place and time?
When we establish that a story’s origin is untrue (such as when we find that its content is stolen from earlier stories, that the authors or publishers are liars or fools etc..,) then we would be more than prudent to question whether any of the content is reliable.
We can’t prove “god” anymore than we can prove “non-god” except for the testimony of those who have and have not encountered such. Testimony alone fares well enough in most courts. It is possible that there are just as many people actually willing to testify that they know God exists as those who would testify that they know he does not. Would it have to be “sworn” testimony?
Testimony alone fares well? So I accuse you of murdering my child, I get a 2-3 friends to do the same.. there is no physical evidence. Shall you be convicted on testimony? And this is a good idea? People throughout history and to the present day merrily report nonsense. Fairies, werewolves, succubi, mermaids, dragons and giants have all been reported by eyewitnesses. For any serious question about the nature of the world, testimony by itself is utterly useless (unless the question goes to the nature of the witnesses, perhaps).
God makers Moses and Paul were both of a highly educated and extremely privileged class within their own societies. That stated, works such as theirs did not happen in a vacuum. Do we suppose that “the story” is complete when scientists have just figured that the creation of our universe most likely did actually begin with “darkness” before the “light”? Now how else could Moses have stated his own story of creation within a few lines while still very carefully explaining that “days” are therein being defined as periods of “light” and “dark” even before the stars, sun and moon were supposedly formed?
I might thereby ask the biblical literalists how anyone with half a brain can figure that the “days” of creation amounted to 24 hour periods when even the Jews who founded the Bible wouldn’t buy that story. So how many hours are in a day at the South Pole?
I’m not a literalist, but one might tell you that when addressing an audience and using a word they know to mean “about 24 hours”, that they would then assume that is what you meant because that is how language works. Day means day. “incomprehensibly vast eon of time” would have easily worked to convey the notion of its referent to a prescientific people. Elsewhere, the Bible describes large numbers. 2 Chronicles says that a million Ethiopians came to the battle. Why is it possible to talk about a battle involving 1.5 million combatants and be understood but not a million years? Why would an all-knowing deity who would know his subjects would misunderstand the time frame involved by a factor of a billion use such a word? And clearly, the people did and largely still do buy into the 7 24-hour days bit. Let’s look at two lines-
13 And there was evening, and there was morning— the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,...
So, we’re supposed to believe that on line 13 the word “day” means a million years or some huge number, but one line later where day pretty clearly means 24 hours along with seasons and years.. does not? This would be the work of an idiot, not an educated prophet or a god.
How did this supposedly erudite Moses explain to people who asked how plants survived through “day” 3 when there was no sun to power them? I suggest this, admittedly stolen from the Simpsons: “whenever something doesn’t make sense.. a wizard did it”. You could exchange wizard for jebus, god, the magic ghost, etc magic is magic after all.
Confusion generally stems from ignorance. It’s no wonder that Christianity is such a wreck, but again, dogma and doctrine causes many to ignore facts in favor of investments in error. If we are to investigate “religion” just like we do science as Richard Dawkins wishes, it pays to cut past the obvious “crud” which starts at “In the beginning…” with the “young earth” adherents. So what should be casually dismissed and what might mean anything at all? A little knowledge is required.
“Hebrew scholars acknowledge the word translated “day” (yôm) has several literal
meanings: daylight, day, time, moment, or long era of time. The question is which
definition of yôm did the Genesis author intend? Biblical Hebrew has a very limited
vocabulary–approximately 3,100 words compared to over 4,000,000 English words.43 In
English, we have many words to describe a long period of time. However, biblical
Hebrew has no word other than yôm to denote a long timespan…
In biblical Hebrew, “evening” (ereb) has several meanings, including “sunset,” “night,”
or “at the turn of evening”47 and conveys a “sense of gradual cessation or diminishing of
activity.”48 “Morning” (qer) also has several meanings, including “the point of time at
which night is changing to day… the end of night, daybreak, dawn”49 or “beginning of
day”50 and conveys a sense of a “new starting of creative activity.”51 Thus, neither term
restricts the meaning of “day” to a 24-hour period.
... As Collins states: “This means that any effort to find this as
defining [24-hour] days runs counter to the author’s [Moses] own presentation.
According to Professor Nathan Aviezer of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, this is consistent
with the way early Talmud scholars approached Genesis 1. He states, “A statement must
be made at the outset about biblical chronology of the six days of creation. Any attempt
to correlate the biblical text with scientific knowledge must necessarily understand the
term ‘day’ to mean a phase or a period in the development of the world, rather than a
time interval of twenty-four hours…”55”
Please note the references to “Hebrew” and “Talmud Scholars”, which might represent a better authority than any johnny-come-lately Christian/would be preacher-type as to what might be meant by the scriptures.
Religion is massive whether regarded as a concept or a business and anything having so much mass naturally has a lot of momentum. Heck, even some of the services are termed “Mass”! That said, spending any (more) time attacking the 24 hour creation thing is much like tilting at windmills, the real dragons are still out there.
Unfortunately, if several people were to testify that they saw me murder someone, it would take a miracle to keep me from being convicted for same. No, this is not a good idea (because I in fact did no such thing) but that’s the way of the world. The point is that this is the way humans deal with most difficult situations in the absence of a king.
When enough people agree on something, it somehow passes in a magical/mystical fashion from being a subjective thing to being an objective one, even in the presence of duress and/or doubt. That anyone in particular actually knows better does not (in actual practice) matter. Many a man has gone to prison or the gallows knowing he is innocent, but that is a small consolation.
My earlier comment as to “testimony” alone creating the facts was an attempt at sarcasim. That which I do know about anything at all is subjective unless in your own madness you tend to agree.
It seems to me very convenient that for thousands of years when it served the religious people to assume God magicked the world into being in a few solar days that interpretation was correct. Today, when apologists or consilience promoters need it to mean “period” then that interpretation becomes correct.
The question is not what does the word yom have the capacity to refer to, but what did it refer to there? Here are problems with your explanation:
-it is NOT agreed upon by all Hebrew scholars that yom is a suitable equivalent for “age”
-if day is figurative than “morning” and “evening” must be also, because they describe day but in all of the old testament evening is never found to figuratively mean “beginning”. When speaking figuratively, morning always means early in the OT and evening means late. Therefore the idea that morning figuratively means “ending” is unsupported in scripture.
-Exodus 20 8:11 we clearly see side by side the word day used to describe the sabbath on which you should rest because god rested after 6 days of creation. like early genesis, you want the reader to assume the word “day” radically changes meaning between two usages only a few words apart, with no context or hint that this should be done?
Most of these observations comes from the book The Quest for Truth. link
My own observations are more basic- if god/moses/santa meant eon and wanted the reader/follower to understand their meaning.. they failed miserably. The fact is that people have believed the opposite for thousands of years (and still do, at least hundreds of thousands). Your god or your prophet is an idiot or at least a comically awful communicator.
As to the trial metaphor.. the point I’m getting at is that eye witnesses alone don’t get you reliable truth. Anecdotes are irrelevant to science. Evidence is the standard by which we learn how our world works and what it is made of. Witness-only standards are the hallmark of every insane cult, superstition, myth salesman and religion in history.
Do you think that the leaders of the Mormon faith actually believe in the literal truth of Mormonism? Or that the leaders of Scientology believe in the literal truth of that faith? Or that the Pope actually believes literally in Christianity? All of them? or just a couple?
Do you think that the leaders of the Mormon faith actually believe in the literal truth of Mormonism? Or that the leaders of Scientology believe in the literal truth of that faith? Or that the Pope actually believes literally in Christianity? All of them? or just a couple?
Who benefits from the ignorance of believers?
Jackson.
That’s exactly what I said about Justice Scalia once here,many posts ago.Does anybody really think he actually believes in god?He claims to be a catholic,I’m sure he is in name.Who benefits from the ignorance of the believers indeed?
