The Two Jesuses [sic]

I have become distinctly aware of the existence of two Jesuses. Many Christians believe in the two seemingly opposite figureheads simultaneously without effort and without the tickling sensation of cognitive dissonance!

Who are they?

 One is, of course, the all powerful all knowing and loving bearded carpenter who died for your sins and kicks ass while somehow still managing to 'turn the other cheek'. This is the Jesus who steals our imaginations and makes us feel safe from the Devil and his demons when we go to sleep at night.

 The other Jesus, as it happens, is a retarded kid who wears a helmet with peeling Power Rangers stickers all over it. He has gum in his self-cut hair, chocolate frosting caked around his mouth, and the subtle odor of poop coming from somewhere on his person. He clumsily rides a bycicle with training wheels down your street, the pinwheel on his handlebars giving him much joy. You know there is much joy because you can hear his big goofy laughs and moans from a half mile away. He can't control the volume of his voice or really what he says. It's mostly gibberish- gibberish that smells like old milk and Fruit Loops when we stands too close to tell you about his hat.

 You can expose Jesus' dual personalities by performing the following experiment:

1. Find a Christian. Take your time. I'll wait...

2. Got one? Ok good! Now let's try to conjure in your subject's mind Super Kick Ass Jesus. Ask questions like "so what is so awesome about Jesus' descent into hell to free the captives following his harrowing crucifixion?"
You'll likely get an answer about how he beat up the Devil, put him in a head lock, kicked in doors, broke the chains that bind, etc. All kick ass stuff. Kick Ass Jesus loves softball questions!

3. Now let's throw the switch and see if we can conjure Retarded Jesus! There is no clear cut way to do this. A simple insult lobbed at Jesus is usually sufficient. Sometimes it takes a string of insults. Our subject will begin to show signs of distress in his/her face. This usually lasts a few seconds, minutes even. If your insult is long enough, they may even cut you off. You will be rewarded with an impassioned defense of poor defenseless Retarded Jesus. "He is love! I didn't know love until I found Jesus! You take that back! I don't hate you so much as have pity on you!". This is generally what you will hear. Be prepared as there will likely be tears involved. Your subject's voice will break. They may storm off, but they will return within minutes to give you another dose of why you are going to Hell for insulting their Lord. 
 
This might sound like the typical Jesus defense, but picture in your mind Retarded Jesus with his inside out Knots Berry Farm tee shirt and 44 ounce Big Gulp cup full of warm red Kool-Aid and you'll start to see what I'm talking about. People defend Jesus the same way they defend retarded children.

 Jesus seems to be stripped of his awesome powers when he is insulted. He then needs his followers' defense to stave off verbal attacks (physical attacks are impossible, which doesn't stop our subjects from being armed to the teeth).  In the last month, I have seen this exact dichotomy revealed twice. The first time, I didn't insult Jesus, but rather the Easter Bunny (!). Somehow that triggered a "Not cool dude! Not cool!" followed by a passionate defense of Jesus. Had I insulted Retarded Jesus? Started to seem that way! The second incident was between two other people. I just happened to be eavesdropping.

 It's like magic! Big-biceped Lord of Lords Jesus shape-shifts into snot bubble perma-smile Jesus who needs help going to the bathroom with a single insult! I wish Christians would leave the vengeance to Jesus himself. He's a big boy who can take care of him self- probably.

Make Your Own Prophesies! Details Inside...

 Ok, it's late and I would like to spend a lot more time on this topic than I am about to. I will probably rewrite this or at the least amend it when I have some more time, but I want at least get it up while I am thinking about it.

 I have devised a formula so that you, the reader can create your own prophesies that work!

Step One: Come up with an overarching event such as a rapture or collapse of a particular civilization.

Step Two: DO NOT specify a time frame for your events to come to fruition.

Step Three: DO NOT name specific names of people, places, or events. If you do, readers are likely to not take them literally, but loosely misinterpret them to represent those of their own environment.

Step Four: Talk plenty of metaphorical gibberish about beasts, dragons, and various types of ugly things.

Step Five: Wait thousands of years until people misinterpret your prophesy (despite your best efforts to adhere to Step Three) by wedging events of their time into the murky language of your nondescript and ambiguous writing.

 Thats it!

 What's that? Don't want to wait thousands of years for people to begin misinterpreting your work? No problem! They probably already have! For an example, look at how folks have interpreted the Revelation of John of Patmos. Ask any Christian- early or contemporary- who the antichrist is and they will likely tell you the name of their most recently elected leader. Ask when the apocalypse is going to happen, they will say "any day now".

 What this all boils down to is everyone wants their god to smile upon them and theirs, and fling the limp corpses of everyone else into the lake of fire. People have been doing it for thousands of years. They want so sincerely for the bad stuff in prophesies to happen to the folks they don't like, that they shoehorn modern events into the context of their holy writ with the deep hope (or rather certainty) that their interpretation is indeed the correct one.

Aren't we rotten?!

 If Christians are really about love and compassion, they should take pity on the unsaved and band together to petition God to have mercy on us heathens (apparently, in some cases, God is willing to negotiate). I'm sure he has plenty of mercy to go around. And if the prophecies turn out to be for another time or president or religion, then at least Christians will have proven to the world that their religion is not about gratuitous blood shed, intolerance, injustice, slavery, abortion, what you do with your weenier/hoo-ha, and a smidgen of warm fuzzy feelins.

 This is highly unlikely as it would seem their xenophobia and hatred are rivaled only by that of their big super daddy. He should have hugged them more when they were children... but not too much. People might talk.

Bible or Quran?

 I had an idea to test the faithful's  knowledge of the book they claim to live by. This one is easy.


Supplies:

• one clipboard
• one pen
• one Bible
• one Quran
• one questionnaire
• one busy pedestrian area or church parking lot

 What we are going to do is see if a common Christian can tell the difference between a Biblical verse and a Quranic verse with no scripture reference.


 First, ask the participant some questions to qualify them. Inquire and document the following:

• What is your first name?
• What city / town do you live in?
• What religion would you say you are affiliated with?
• What church do you attend and how often?
• How would you describe your relationship with God?
• How much of the Bible would you say you have read?
• How much of the Quran would you say you have read?
• On a scale on one to five, how would you rate your knowledge of the content of either work?
• Do you believe every Biblical scripture to be God's inerrant word verbatim?
• Do you believe Allah as depicted in the Quran to be benevolent or malevolent, just or unjust?
• Do you believe God as depicted in the Bible to be benevolent or malevolent, just or unjust?
• etc.

The qualifying questions may vary depending on the surveyor. They are simply to qualify participants and group them by their location, religious affiliation, and self proclaimed knowledge of their respective holy texts. 

 You might tell participants you are conducting a scriptural literacy survey in order to grade how well clergy are representing God's word, or something to this affect. This would be mostly true ;).


 Next, present participants with three verses at a time.  You may also use sets of five scriptures. The main thing is I want to avoid the 50/50 chance they would have if you showed them two scriptures. Ask them to check which they think are Biblical and which are Quranic. Make the first three to five or so sets fairly easy. Then increase difficulty.


 Here are some examples:


Please identify the following verses to be Biblical or Quranic:

•  For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
• And who believe in that which is revealed unto thee (Muhammad) and that which was revealed before thee, and are certain of the Hereafter.
• The lightning almost snatcheth away their sight from them. As often as it flasheth forth for them they walk therein, and when it darkeneth against them they stand still. If Allah willed, He could destroy their hearing and their sight. Lo! Allah is able to do all things.

This set would definitely be considered "easy" as the Biblical verse is a commonly recited one, and the two Quranic verses refer to Allah, the unmistakable name of God in the Muslim tradition.

 Here is a more difficult set:

• O mankind! worship your Lord, Who hath created you and those before you, so that ye may ward off evil.
• He said: O Adam! Inform them of their names, and when he had informed them of their names, He said: Did I not tell you that I know the secret of the heavens and the earth ? And I know that which ye disclose and which ye hide.
• And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

This set also contains two Quranic and one Biblical Scripture. I chose them at random.

 Your intermediate difficulty sets should contain scriptures that sound common to each other in language or topic. Example:

• Scripture about helping the poor
• Scripture about loving your parents
• Scripture about obeying the laws of the land, etc

Or:

• Scripture about sacrificing animals
• Scripture about God's wrath on sinners
• Scripture about hell

 Next, I will chose one "nice" Quranic passage and two bloody ones from the Bible:

• Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.
• And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
• And remember when We made a covenant with the Children of Israel, saying: Worship none save God only, and be good to parents and to kindred and to orphans and the needy, and speak kindly to mankind; and establish worship and pay the poor-due. Then, after that, ye slid back, save a few of you, being averse.

 You get the idea.

 For the first few "easy" sets, use Allah where it is written in your particular translation, to make it obvious to the participant. In the next sets, advise the participant you have replaced the word Allah with more neutral terms like God or The Lord. Tell them you have removed parenthesis and other punctuation that might give away the source of the text (KJV has italics in some places, my English Quran translations have parenthesis in various places). The idea is to see if they can discern the content of the text itself, not artifacts such as punctuation or nomenclature left by the translators.

 I would do three easy sets, three intermediate sets, and nineteen or forty-four difficult sets for each participant.

 What would this prove? Well, we can't count on every Christian to know every verse in every book of the Bible. This is not to test their memory of what's where, but rather to quantify their confirmation bias in attributing scriptures to a particular deity (you could even do the same thing with Hitler and the Pope 'Who did this nice thing or that evil thing?'). If they believe the god of the Christians is only capable of perfect justice and good will, and the god of Islam is full of murder and hate, then they are likely to identify a verse that explicitly describes God performing abortions on folks he don't like to be the work of Allah, and a verse commanding us to be kind to our grandparents and orphans to be from none other than our loving God of the Bible (as I have shown in my third example set, this is untrue). Also we want to evaluate their knowledge of the content of the Bible (Did they know God aborts babies? Do they ignore such scriptures?). Maybe this will shed some light on how different they think they are from their enemies, and how similar they are in reality.

 Of course, you must flip the equation so that good verses from the bible and bad ones from the Quran exist in one set. This would only be fair to the participants.

 Only reveal the results to the participants after the questionnaire is completed. Even then, you may choose to not reveal their score directly to them, but rather post the overall findings in your blog (and mine too!) including some individual questionnaires you found particularly illuminating. Don't tell them the ratio of Biblical:Quranic scripture in each set.

 The participant is not to take help from bystanders, internet, or on the telephone during the survey.

As for finding the actual scriptures, I used the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. It categorizes each and every Biblical, Quranic, and Mormon scripture by several criteria. It's easy to quickly find "good stuff", "injustice", "contradictions", etc. I try to be subjective with this resource though. Some scriptures categorized as contradictions didn't seem all that contradictory to me. Use your own judgment, as in all cases, when choosing scriptures.

 My hypothesis is this:

• Easy sets will tend to be answered correctly most of the time.
• Medium difficulty sets among casual or non-practicing Christians will be random.
• Medium difficulty sets among more studied Christians will begin to show a little less randomness.
• Difficult sets among casual or non-practicing Christians will be heavily incorrect.
• Difficult sets among more studied Christians will be... I don't know! Maybe we'll find out!
• Over all, participants as a whole will display less than 25% accuracy.

 Please, If you think this is a good idea and decide to try it, let me know about it, and please post your findings here. Or if you can make this idea better, let me know! I am fascinated by statistics, though I am not particularly skilled at designing experiments. If you are, I'd like you help.

"Better Know an Atheist"

 I have an idea to educate our faithful counterparts. Too often, religious folks post replies to blogs, youtube, etc, that are inflammatory fluff that do nothing to inform the reader or bolster their own argument. They quote scripture with the assumption that everybody believes it to be the word of God. They say things that make themselves feel good, but fail to shed any real light on the issue.

I see a need.

Atheists (of the confrontational and courageous variety of course!) should make attempts to teach our good faith-heads how to argue with atheists. I think this could be a good vehicle to plant seeds of rationality and incredulity among those who are most isolated. Here is how my idea works:

You (atheist's name here) contact a local church leader and say you're interested in teaching a lecture at his/her church about exactly what atheism is and how to argue against it. Tell the pastor that you are tired of hearing arguments which are nothing more than meaningless dribble (in nicer words though) from Christians leveled toward atheists. Tell him you know Christians are smarter than this (an assumption) and they should have better articulated, more concise arguments. You should back up your claim with quotes from Christians found on Richard Dawkin's site and others. Tell the good pastor that you don't feel this type of vitriol represents the love of Christ and his flock should be better at "loving thy neighbor".  Tell the pastor you will not charge a fee for this service. Tell him there will be no "funny business" or de-conversion attempts.
 How you can word your proposal so that you are not met with a tongue lashing is beyond my imagination, but it is doable. Be very kind and listen to his ideas if he bites.

 Once a date and time is settled upon, hire a small security team to protect you. You are going to be in the lion's den and you need security. Make sure not to enlist local police as they can be quite biased and not of much help if things get sticky. Have cameras ready incase a member of the church later misrepresents or skews any part of the lecture, you will have video footage. A pastor gets an uncut copy afterwards, and an uncut copy goes directly to youtube.

 Have "Better Know an Atheist" on the marquee and in local papers. Try to draw a large number of people to the event.

 There would be a standard fully featured power point lecture, followed by a question and answer session where the speaker and audience may ask each other questions. It should be known that no shouting would be permitted, as all participants are adults. Unless of course children are present, in which case let them serve as examples of civility to the adults.

  If I were doing the lecture, I would start off by sincerely stating my gratitude to the pastor and the congregation for being so open minded as to let an atheist in their midst. I would lay down the ground rules- no shouting, conversions in either direction, etc, and allow the pastor to open with a prayer.

 Then I would try to make the audience as comfortable with me as possible. I would describe my twenty six plus years as a struggling born again Christian and outline the beliefs I held during that time. I would quote scriptures that helped me. I would speak their language, because for so many years it was my language.

 Now to the meat.
I would read several scriptures that command us to love one another and our enemies. I would follow with quotes by Christians taken from Dawkin's "The Ugly" page, but with references to atheists or atheism replaced with references to a football team (preferably the beloved local team) and references to God or Christianity to those of the next town's football team and head coach. (note: It will take a smarter man than I to do this. I just tried it. The hatred and language doesn't  translate well.) "This is what real people have said. Do you think these people are following God's commandments to love one another? How do these hate filled attacks on your home team make you feel? What would you say to this person in response? Could you control your own anger?"
 "Now I have a surprise for you." Then I would replace the "football team comment" slide with the original atheist quote. "This is how folks like you talk to folks like me on a daily basis..." You get the idea.

 The next part is still a little grey in my mind, but I would try to guide the audience members with some pointers on how to talk to atheists without resorting to hate filled language, and how this will in affect make them better arguers and better respected among peoples of all stripes. I would encourage them to follow God's teachings regarding being kind to one another, even if you disagree.

 At some point, I would educate the audience of why I became an atheist. I would quote a lot of blood filled and rape/incest passages from one of their Bibles. I would tell them I don't see much love in the book, and could find better moral guidance in Moby Dick. I wouldn't force them to defend these passages on the spot, But I would simply make them aware of their existence.
 "You can better argue your faith if you know what scriptures an atheist is going to quote." While I'm at it, I would cite countless contradictions found everywhere in one of their Bibles. Again, better to know what an atheist might say. You get my direction?

 I would have to clarify that an atheist would not quote scripture because he/she believes God and his word are factual, and bloody, and evil. Rather I would educate the audience that the atheist is simply trying to say "I know you think you're holy and righteous and kind and charitable for believing every word of this book, but have you read every word of this book?" A militant atheist might not be so kind in their query.
 Quoting scripture because you are trying to lay down a solid case for why you hate God is more akin to anti-theism. Atheists don't hate God any more than they hate trolls or dragons.

 Any way, I'm off track here.

 During the question and answer segment, I would allow participants to ask questions regarding how to talk to atheists, and in general, what atheists are about. How to keep participants from shouting is beyond me. Maybe the pastor can help in this regard. For each question asked by the audience, I would in return ask a question of the audience regarding something they believe. I would never resort to Dawkin's "you don't actually believe that do you?" as this is a device that is more likely to enrage the person being questioned rather than yield a thoughtful response. I would choose my questions carefully so that the audience might learn more about themselves, their faith, and their biases from their answers than I would.

 I would close by asking the pastor to pray over the congregation (as he would no doubt do anyway). Then I would linger to talk directly to folks who would be interested in further discussion.

 AT NO POINT would I ever raise my voice or insult an audience member or the audience as a whole. If offense is taken, it is only because someone had the intention of taking offense, not because I had the intention of offending. I would remain clear and calm throughout the entire session, and hope that the congregation would return the favor.

Note: I would leave science out of the discussion as much as possible. I would assume they know less about science than their own scripture. Unless you want to educate them on what exactly science is and does, in which case, go for it. But trying to win an argument with a Christian using science and evidence is like a Christian trying to win an argument with an atheist by quoting John 3:16. It only serves to make the quoter feel better about their own team.

 Anyway, thats my idea. It's a little nebulous at the moment, but I will update this post as more ideas and clarification come to me. I hope someone (smarter than me) someday gives this a shot.

Tell me what you think. Good idea? Bad idea?

Why Are Atheists so Dumb and Stupid, and They're Dumb Ignorant Smelly Faces are Dumb as a Butt?

Yeesh! I Googled "the cowardly atheist" and was greeted with, not references to my own blog, but with the same Christian love and humility one might expect from a race of people who truly believe God made everything for them. The title for this post is a slightly exaggerated summation of the links pulled up by Google.

Folks of the religious persuasion have the deepest and sincerest belief that they themselves are the epitome of humility and servitude; courage and righteousness; intelligence and certainty. Who am I, a lowly atheist shit-on, to argue? These same folks aspire to paint atheists as angry, indignant, cowardly, godless whores who feed from the bottom of the stagnant shallow ponds of humanities' intellectual wasteland; Just because we have the pompous arrogance to say we are infinitesimally small in a universe that is immensely huge; that we don't have all the answers, but are driven to seek them out by observing our environment and not the bronze-age ancient texts of the land (the United States has adopted its ancient texts of someone else's land). Can you believe the guile? The idea that the universe is not centered around us; the idea that we are in the spiral arm of a not so special galaxy in a sea of galaxies; the idea that there is no one there to smote our bad guys for us, kiss our boo-boos, and tuck us in at night so the bed bugs wont bite. What gall!

When I was a Christian, I used to think atheists were angry because they didn't have Christ's love in their hearts. Once free to think as I please, I developed the theory that atheists are angry because they feel they are surrounded by MORONS. This, I realized, is a very human thing to do, and since we are all mammals*, I began looking for a natural explanation. Here it is:

The person who most embodies righteous certitude is YOU.

The person who most embodies pompous arrogance is the OTHER GUY.

Think about our tribal and self centered nature. When was the last time you went to a football game, and felt bad when the opposing team was blocked by your team? When did you ever say, "Good for them!" when the opposing team out foxed your team? In the last instance, you probably had images in your head of kicking in the teeth of the other teams head coach. No doubt, a majority of fans on the other side of the stadium had similar fantasies about your team.

When was the last time you exploded in a fit of road-rage, all the while knowing it was your fault the guy next you swerved? NEVER! It's never your fault, It's always their fault!

What makes your religion the correct religion doesn't really have much to do with the facts as you see them or the tingling in your spine or the image of Mother Mary in your Cream of Wheat. The biggest factor determining your religion to be the correct religion is the fact that its YOU who believes it. And as we all know, YOU are incapable of making mistakes; another interesting behavior we humans are quite good at; always being right. Im doing it right now, and so are you.

The problem is, some ideas are indeed right and some ideas are flat out wrong. If every supporter of a wrong idea immediately switched to the correct idea as soon as new evidence to support it emerged, there would be far fewer proponents of wrong outdated ideas. As smart as we are, we as a culture aren't quite smart enough to readily identify, re-evaluate, and abandon obsolete ideas and practices in favor of new ones. We cling to our old vestiges with the hope that we will indeed triumph over the "new comers" and continue to do as we have always done...

A paradigm shift occurs only when the perpetuators of the old ways die out. The Pope didn't officially acknowledge Galileo's observation that the earth orbited sun until 1992. Old habits die hard.


__________
* If you don't think you are a mammal, ask of your species, "Do we have hair? Are we warm blooded? Do we give birth to live young? Do we have tits?" Hopefully the answer to all these questions is "yes"  In which case, congratulations! You're a mammal. (if "no", you are either a resident of Australia, or you should consider moving there, as your government will likely be very interested in you).