A letter to Believers

[Interbane]

Dear Believer,

You asked me to consider Christianity as the answer for my life. I have done that. I consider it untrue, repugnant, and harmful.

You expect me to believe Jesus was born of a virgin impregnated by a ghost? Do you believe all the crazy tales of ancient religions? Julius Caesar was reportedly born of a virgin; Roman historian Seutonius said Augustus bodily rose to heaven when he died; and Buddha was supposedly born speaking. You don't believe all that, do you? Why do you expect me to swallow the fables of Christianity?

I find it incredible that you ask me to believe that the earth was created in six literal days; women come from a man's rib; a snake, a donkey, and a burning bush spoke human language; the entire world was flooded, covering the mountains to drown evil; all animal species, millions of them, rode on one boat; language variations stem from the tower of Babel; Moses had a magic wand; the Nile turned to blood; a stick turned into a snake; witches, wizards, and sorcerers really exist; food rained from the sky for 40 years; people were cured by the sight of a brass serpent; the sun stood still to help Joshua win a battle, and it went backward for King Hezekiah; men survived unaided in a fiery furnace; a detached hand floated in the air and wrote on a wall; men followed a star which directed them to a particular house; Jesus walked on water unaided; fish and bread magically multiplied to feed the hungry; water instantly turned into wine; mental illness is caused by demons; a “devil” with wings exists who causes evil; people were healed by stepping into a pool agitated by angels; disembodied voiced spoke from the sky; Jesus vanished and later materialized from thin air; people were healed by Peter's shadow; angels broke people out of jail; a fiery lake of eternal torment awaits unbelievers under the earth ... while there is life-after-death in a city which is 1,500 miles cubed, with mansions and food, for Christians only.

If you believe these stories, then you are the one with the problem, not me. These myths violate natural law, contradict science, and fail to correspond with reality or logic. If you can't see that, then you can't separate truth from fantasy. It doesn't matter how many people accept delusions inflicted by “holy” men; a widely held lie is still a lie. If you are so gullible, then you are like the child who believes the older brother who says there is a monster in the hallway. But there is nothing to be afraid of; go turn on the light and look for yourself.

If Christianity were simply untrue I would not be too concerned. Santa is untrue, but it is a harmless myth which people outgrow. But Christianity, besides being false, is also abhorrent. It amazes me that you claim to love the god of the bible, a hateful, arrogant, sexist, cruel being who can't tolerate criticism. I would not want to live in the same neighborhood with such a creature!

The biblical god is a macho male warrior. Though he said “Thou shalt not kill,” he ordered death for all opposition, wholesale drowning and mass exterminations; punishes offspring to the fourth generation (Ex. 20:5); ordered pregnant women and children to be ripped up (Hos. 13:16); demands animal and human blood to appease his angry vanity; is partial to one race of people; judges women to be inferior to men; is a sadist who created a hell to torture unbelievers; created evil (Is. 45:7); discriminated against the handicapped (Lev. 21:18-23); ordered virgins to be kept as spoils of war (Num. 31:15-18, Deut. 21:11-14); spread dung on people's faces (Mal. 2:3); sent bears to devour 42 children who teased a prophet (II Kings 2:23-24); punishes people with snakes, dogs, dragons, drunkenness, swords, arrows, axes, fire, famine, and infanticide; and said fathers should eat their sons (Ez. 5:10). Is that nice? Would you want to live next door to such a person?

And Jesus is a chip off the old block. He said, “I and my father are one,” and he upheld “every jot and tittle” of the Old Testament law. Mt. 5:18 He preached the same old judgment: vengeance and death, wrath and distress, hell and torture for all nonconformists. He believed in demons, angels and spirits. He never denounced the subjugation of slaves or women. Women were excluded as disciples and as guests at his heavenly table. Except for hell he introduced nothing new to ethics or philosophy. He was disrespectful of his mother and brothers; he said we should hate our parents and desert our families. Mt. 10:35-36, Lk. 14:26 (So much for “Christian family life.”) He denounced anger, but was often angry himself. Mt. 5:22, Mk. 3:5 He called people “fools” (Mt. 23:17,19), “serpents,” and “white sepulchers,” though he warned that such language puts you in danger of hellfire. Mt. 5:22 He said “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword." Mt. 10:34 (So much for “Peace on Earth.”) He irrationally cursed and withered a fig tree for being barren out of season. Mt. 21:19 He mandated burning unbelievers. Jn. 15:6 (The Church has complied with relish.) He stole a horse. Lk. 19:30-33 He told people to cut off hands, feet, eyes and sexual organs. Mt. 5:29-30, 19:12 You want me to accept Jesus, but I think I'll pick my own friend, thank you.

One of Jesus's many contradictions was saying good works should be seen, and not seen. Mt. 5:16, 6:1-4 One of his mistakes was saying that the mustard plant has the smallest seed. Mt. 13:31-32 The writers of Matthew and Luke could not even get his genealogy straight, contradicting the Old Testament, and giving Jesus two discrepant lines through Joseph, his non-father!

I also find Christianity to be morally repugnant. The concepts of original sin, depravity, substitutionary forgiveness, intolerance, eternal punishment, and humble worship are all beneath the dignity of intelligent human beings and conflict with the values of kindness and reason. They are barbaric ideas for primitive cultures cowering in fear and ignorance.

Finally, Christianity is harmful. More people have been killed in the name of a god than for any other reason. The Church has a shameful, bloody history of Crusades, Inquisitions, witch-burnings, heresy trials, American colonial intolerance, disrespect of indigenous traditions (such as American Indians), support of slavery, and oppression of women. Modern “fruits” of religion include the Jonestown massacre, the callous fraud of “faith healers,” recent wars and ethnic cleansing, and fighting in Northern Ireland. Religion also poses a danger to mental health, damaging self-respect, personal responsibility, and clarity of thought.

Do you see why I do not respect the biblical message? It is an insulting bag of nonsense. You have every right to torment yourself with such insanity — but leave me out of it. I have better things to do with my life.

-Dan Barker

[Bart]

Yeah...Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor of the FFrF are doin' the Lard's work. Dog bless em both.
(btw Nov.'s issue of Freethought Today will have an article on my pet rescue business and book

Unfortunately while this letter is a great summary of the idiocy and ills of Christianity and makes perfectly good sense to the rational thinking person -- to the religiously infected it becomes just another opportunity for them to roll out their mind numbing apologetics based on "cuz the Bible me so."

[Suzanne]

Interbane:

Your letter addressed to believers has stuck a cord inside of me that I must confess plays sadly. I do feel that your letter will be undeliverable to the majority of those who want so urgently to have a thick, unrealistic, unobtainable branch of “divine” intervention to cling to. Your words ring true, and it saddens me to realize that those who your letter is addressed to will throw it out, like junk mail. I just want you to know that I received it, and would have gladly paid a COD.

Your “letter” addresses many fallacies that believers hold dear, and in doing so, it highlights in bright, blinking neon the lunacy of the belief in these fallacies. It highlights the stagnation of thinking that has occurred in many of those your letter is addressed to. It is saddening to know, that your letter will only be appreciated by those who can hear the ring of truth of your words.

It must be phenomenal to live in a world where the deaf can miraculously hear, and the blind can be restored of eyesight, and the lame can be given the gift of wholeness. It must be phenomenal to believe that a world like this ever existed, more fantastic yet to believe it still does.
That world has never existed.

Children with leukemia do not miraculously heal, the battered woman and abused children do not miraculously heal, and the poor do not miraculously have food delivered. However, blind believers are confident that their eyesight is miraculously keener than the eyesight of those whose eyes are wide open and excepting of the truth. Once you are excepting of the truth, eyes open wide, and can see the poverty and the illnesses and the hardships that truly exist in our world. The blind see nothing but are able to feel compassionately about a world of miracles.

I want to see some! I want to see some miracles happen without the hard work of individuals who realize that it is up to humankind to relieve the hardships that occur in this world.

Ohhh, the perks of being blind! What a phenomenal, miraculous world it must be to the blind addressees of your letter. I’ll keep my eyesight, and my eyes wide open, thank you very much!

[Bart]

Suzanne,

Kudos to your posting.

I'm sure Interbane would want you to know that letter was written by Dan Barker, ex-evangelical minister, now atheist and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

[Suzanne]

Bart wrote

I'm sure Interbane would want you to know that letter was written by Dan Barker, ex-evangelical minister, now atheist and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

OK, that's pretty embarassing.

I'll just have to re-address it and send it in a stamped envelope to Dan Barker!

Damn, sounded just like Interbane.

Still does

[johnson1010]

i heard Dan Barker speak last year.

He's a good guy. I bought a book from him, "Losing faith in faith" that chronicles his fall from religion and some of his writing on behalf of the freedom from religion foundation.

pretty good stuff.

It is an interesting point of view coming from a man who spent so many years submerged in belief.

[DWill]

Here's a reaction to Dan Barker's letter from a soft atheist:

Dan makes two mistakes, I think. He assumes that a 'believer' must subscribe to everything that is in the bible, that just because a statement, story, or belief is between two covers, then, perforce, a 'believer' is signed on to the teaching or implication of that content, and is led by it and animated by it. If you say you're a Christian, then you must believe all of this!, is what he tells 'believers.' That is not the way it really works. Relgions, and believers, are not what scriptural books or religious authority figures say they are. Religions and believers change and develop
and are often out of step with their scripture and their leadership. Religion evolves, as Robert Wright tells us in his recent book The Evolution of God. 'Believers' pick and choose.

Dan must also have noted from his past religious days that most 'believers' participate for reasons other than just belief. Their participation in a church group is not to them some kind of truth claim. They feel spiritually uplifted by the experience, I suppose.

The second mistake Dan Barker makes is to assume that nominal beliefs are animating beliefs. Whatever surveys such as Sam Harris' report about Americans endorsing supernatural or fundamentalist beliefs, it is unknown how much these beliefs influence or motivate them. I think from the generally moderate behavior of Americans that what these surveys report shouldn't be of great concern. With a majority reporting that they believe in creationism, isn't it odd that citizens don't fight [/i]more for creationism to be included in the public schools? They really don't care enough about the issue to do that.

This blanket demonization of religion from Dan Barker and others is a big error. The 'how much better off we would have been without religion' line is a dead end. Show me the alternate world that proves this is so. We have no other nature to use than our human nature, from which religion arose. (I was just today thinking about the value of religion--the Christian one--to the slaves and the early civil rights movement. A good example of people adapting religion to their needs. What would be Barker's criticism here?)

Dan creates, at least in part, a straw man in his letter.

[Robert Tulip]

...life-after-death in a city which is 1,500 miles cubed...
-Dan Barker

Interbane, thanks for posting Dan's atheist rant, it is a good read.

I've highlighted one of the 'absurdities' in his long list in this quote, the 1500 mile cube. As it is an idea I find fascinating, I hope others may be interested in my reading of it.

The cube is of course the New Jerusalem as described in the Bible.

Actually, the measure of the holy city given in the Apocalypse is 12,000 stadia. Considered as a framework of astral wisdom, this measure seems to me to contain a plausible astronomical code. The length 12,000 corresponds to an older Indian doctrine of the cycle of time through the Great Year, the time the equinox cycles once about the sky, and written in slightly distorted form in the Vedas.

Some thought the Great Year was 24,000 years in duration, while others suggested 25920 years. The Great Year is actually 25,765 years long. It appears the 24,000 year estimate was used for Vedic reckoning of the main cycle of time.

The 12,000 stadia figure in the Bible matches half the Vedic estimate of the Great Year. A reason to consider this a real basis is that the period from one side of the Great Year to the other is actually close to 12,000 years, like from one side of the cube to the other. Astronomically, this means that all the stars are now opposite where they were vis-a-vis time of year measured by the seasons about 12,000 years ago.

The New Jerusalem cube maps on well to this Great Year picture of the cycle of the stars through the ages. It also maps to the Vedic myth that half the period is 'ascending' and half is 'descending'. In the Vedic theory the Golden Age was when Vega and Canopus were the pole stars, in 11,500 BC, and things steadliy worsened until the depth of the Iron Age of ignorance in about 500 AD. By this reckoning we are about 1500 years into the ascending 12,000 years of the cycle towards the next Golden Age.

This Vedic cycle maps precisely to the Bible theory of fall and redemption from 4000 BC to 3000 AD, encoded especially in the phrase of the tribulation period as 'time, times and half a time', suggesting 3.5 ages or seven days of the cosmos, with the last day (thousand years) of Christian time as a cosmic sabbath of the millennium.

The 3.5 Ages of Christian time are the periods when the equinox has traversed Taurus, Aries, Pisces, and half of Aquarius. If Christ marks the centre of time as alpha and omega at year 0, when the equinox moved from Aries into Pisces, then the Pisces-Aquarius cusp is in 2147-8 AD, the Taurus-Aries cusp (Abraham) is 2147 BC, and the Gemini-Taurus cusp (matching Eden as Creation) is 4294 BC.

The wall of the holy city is described as having 144 cubits. I read this to say the circle of the Great Year is divided in 144 segments. This is in fact the case, with Jupiter Saturn and Neptune forming conjunctions every 179 years, precisely 1/144th of the Great Year. How they might have known that back then I can't imagine.

The proof of this interpretation method is the twelve jewels, the twelve foundation stones of the holy city, which are traditionally symbols of the twelve zodiac signs in reverse from Pisces to Aries, exactly describing the precession of the equinox through the Great Year.

All the Bible can be read through an astral framework. In my opinion this provides the only intelligible scientific way to extract the hidden meaning of the text.

[geo]

I've highlighted one of the 'absurdities' in his long list in this quote, the 1500 mile cube. As it is an idea I find fascinating, I hope others may be interested in my reading of it.

The cube is of course the New Jerusalem as described in the Bible.

Actually, the measure of the holy city given in the Apocalypse is 12,000 stadia. Considered as a framework of astral wisdom, this measure seems to me to contain a plausible astronomical code. The length 12,000 corresponds to an older Indian doctrine of the cycle of time through the Great Year, the time the equinox cycles once about the sky, and written in slightly distorted form in the Vedas.

Stop right there. If I am going to try to decipher your post, I need to know what 'astral wisdom' is.

[Interbane]

Show me the alternate world that proves this is so. We have no other nature to use than our human nature, from which religion arose.

I agree with you on your points DWill, but I suggest we look at examples of modern secular societies as to how well we could do without religion. There are other factors that weigh in on a population's happiness, but the correlation is still remarkable. Even the least of it's implications is that we certainly don't need religious belief to be happy.

"And what has secularism done to Norway? The Global Peace Index rates Norway the most peaceful country in the world. The Human Development Index, a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living, has ranked Norway No. 1 every year for the last five years."