Quotes about Jesus

Quotations are selected from this pool (and other quotation pools) in a pseudorandom way every hour and inserted at the top and bottom of some of the major pages on this website. Feel free to copy any of these quotes and paste them for whatever purpose you please, including on your own website, blog, social media page or forum debate posts.

Jesus’ Name

Mary must have been a space cadet to give her Jewish son a Mexican name.

~ Ann American (1990-07-04 age:27)

Jesus’ Name

What a weird trip Mary lay on her son Jesus, giving him a swear word for a name.

~ Ann American (1990-07-04 age:27)

Followers of Jesus

Dear Jesus
Please save me from your followers.

~ Anonymous

Jesus the Hippy

A support group for people who believe God manifested on earth as a Jewish hippy some twenty centuries ago, then killed himself on a cross in order to spare his own creation from his own wrath.

~ Anonymous

Can you imagine being a Catholic missionary trying to sell this nonsense to Amazonians?

Jesus the Jewish Zombie

Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

~ Anonymous

Can you imagine being a Catholic missionary trying to sell this nonsense to Algonquins?

Long Spoons in Heaven and Hell

A holy man was having a conversation with the Lord one day and said, Lord, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like. The Lord led the holy man to two doors. He opened one of the doors and the holy man looked in. In the middle of the room was a large round table. In the middle of the table was a large pot of stew which smelled delicious and made the holy man’s mouth water. The people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished. They were holding spoons with very long handles that were strapped to their arms and each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful, but because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths. The holy man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering. The Lord said, You have seen Hell.

They went to the next room and opened the door. It was exactly the same as the first one. There was the large round table with the large pot of stew which made the holy man’s mouth water. The people were equipped with the same long-handled spoons, but here the people were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking. The holy man said, I don’t understand. It is simple, said the Lord, it requires but one skill. You see, they have learned to feed each other, while the greedy think only of themselves. When Jesus died on the cross he was thinking of you!

~ Anonymous

You hear this story frequently. The evil Catholic priest in Boardwalk Empire even quoted it. The core message is admirable, but the story makes me puke. It is so sanctimonious, so corny, so phony, so contrived, so Christian.

We Are All Atheists

We are all atheists with the gods of others.

~ ATEA (2008 age:9) Associação Brasileira de Ateus e Agnósticos

How Dumb Are They?

They [Christian rednecks] were so stupid that they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were printed on the bottom.

~ Joe Bageant (1946-01-01 age:72) Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War

Bedford’s Wager

The Riddle of Epicurus

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

~ Epicurus (341 BC 270 BC age:71)

1. If you don’t believe in God and you are wrong, after you die, so long as you have lead a moral life you should have nothing to fear. A compassionate god would not punish you for guessing which religion had an exclusive handle on the truth.
2. If you believe in God and you are wrong, you will have done foolish things such as wasting time praying when you should have taken effective action. You will have lived your life as if it did not matter because you erroneously thought it was merely a trial, preparatory to your real life after death. You would have lived an overly safe conventional life, keeping your nose clean and avoiding all adventure. You would have let evil thrive because you felt dealing with that was God’s responsibility, not yours. You would have done irrational things just because some hoary old book tricked you into it, like mistreating blacks or gays. You would have wasted much of your life in fear of the imaginary divine meat axe.
3. If you don’t believe in God and you are right, you live a zestful life. Every second counts. It is all you have got. You don’t fritter your time in ritualistic activities. You take responsibility for the planet. You make a difference. You made your decisions rationally, not based on fear of some lunatic bogeyman in the sky. You behave well not because you fear punishment, but because you know that such behaviour is globally and locally optimal, good for everyone and also for you. You are a blessing to the planet.
4. If you believe in God and you are right, you are more likely than not to be an insufferably smug hypocrite, looking down your nose at others and judging incessantly just as Jesus told you not to do. God judges your actions, not your beliefs. In Luke 13:25, Jesus warned you that mere praying would not get you into heaven; only good deeds would. You get punished doubly since you ought to have known better.

~ Darwin Bedford the atheist messiah, at atheists.net

Time For Prayer

Remo Williams: Jesus! Chiun: Concentrate. This is no time for prayer.

~ Remo Williams, the Adventure Begins

Jesus and the Naked Boy

And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body ; and the young men laid hold on him:

And he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked.

~ Mark 14:51-52

Freedom to Worship Jesus

The constitution gives you the right to worship Jesus in any way you please.

~ Sothin Biegot

Why Persecute Gays?

It is good to persecute gays because gay people are not smarter than Jesus Christ.

~ A Russian religious bigot

Had he checked with his bible, he would have discovered that Jesus had nothing negative to say about gays. It was St. Paul, Leviticus and Deuteronomy who condemned people to be stoned to death for manner of even the tiniest religious superstition transgressions, such as eating shrimp or raking leaves on Sunday, or going to a non-Christian church.

Killer Chaplains

I’m there to support them [soldiers] in their mission, you know, winning a war and that means taking lives.

~ Lt. Col. Lyn Brown US Army chaplain

I heard Brown on NPR (National Public Radio) This American Life explaining that his job essentially was convincing soldiers reluctant to kill that God approved and wanted the soldier to kill people and win the war. You can listen to the interview as he confesses his revolting crimes twisting the bible to justify murder on the grounds Jesus healed the daughter of a soldier, implying Jesus must thus have approved of what the soldier did. That is so sick. Even doctors treat war criminals, which does not in the least imply approval. I could imagine a Nazi chaplain giving this exact same pep talk to encourage a soldier to fight in a similar illegal aggressive war. This chaplain is more immoral than the sleasiest lawyer.

In traditional Christian theology, it is the devil’s work to trick someone into committing a mortal sin. What motivates this piece of shit? It can’t be defending the USA. He knows full well the USA attacked Afghanistan and Iraq not the reverse and neither country has the means to mount an attack. Perhaps a vicarious thrill thinking about the killing and child suffering he cheerleads? He can’t claim ignorance. He admits he thoroughly thought over the morality of what he was doing and decided for evil.

Execution Symbol

If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs round their necks instead of crosses.

~ Lenny Bruce (1925-10-13 1966-08-03 age:40)

Holy Vision

When I was praying in depth with my prayer group, Jesus told me that you [Richard Dawkins] are the devil. I saw him with my own eyes.

~ A Christian

I think you mean you hallucinated a man with a beard and long hair. Jesus came from Palestine, so we don’t know exactly how he looked, but he likely looked like a modern Palestinian, not the Nordic Jesus popular on postcards. So that man you saw is clearly not Jesus just how you falsely imagine Jesus.

The Almah Confusion

The point is well known to biblical scholars and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is almah, which undisputedly means young woman, with no implication of virginity. If virgin had been intended, bethulah could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word maiden illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The translation occurred with the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into παρθενος (parthenos), which really does mean virgin. Matthew (not of course the apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophesy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions of the New English Bible correctly give young woman in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave virgin in Matthew, since they are translating from his Greek.

~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26 age:77), The Selfish Gene, endnotes on chapter 2

Matthew, the writer of the allegedly inerrant bible, is caught red-handed lying to make his tale sound more impressive. How can anyone possibly trust that this man did not tell other serious lies in the rest of his account?

Biblical Date Oopsie

Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius — a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole — but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod’s death.

~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26 age:77), The God Delusion page 94.

In other words Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally inconsistent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah’s prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus in his fictitious drama.

Birthplace of Jesus

A good example of the colouring of religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written many years after Jesus’ death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophesy ( Micah 5:2 ) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophesy, John’s gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem; Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh out of the seed of David and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?

Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.

~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26 age:77), The God Delusion page 93.

Jesus in Hollywood

Jesus is a powerful guy in Hollywood. Not quite as powerful as Vin Diesel, but powerful.

~ Christian Finnegan (1973-01-01 age:45) 1965-10

Divinity Of Jesus

Not only has the divinity of Christ been given up, but his existence as a man is being more and more seriously questioned. Some of the ablest scholars of the world deny that he ever lived at all. A commanding literature dealing with the inquiry, intense in its seriousness and profound and thorough in its research, is growing up in all countries, and spreading the conviction that Christ is a myth.

~ Marshall Gauvin (1881 1978 age:97)

Sting of Death

What is uniquely consoling about religious belief is that it takes the sting out of death. It’s the story that tells you that death is not a bad thing, despite appearances. This is why it is so deeply attractive to so many millions and millions of people, but in geopolitical term we want the sting in death. The people who are not deterred by the threat of death are supremely dangerous when they get their hands on the big bombs, and we do not want millenarian Christians who think Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds at any minute and save the day to be writing our nuclear policy or deciding how any mid-east peace crisis is resolved or not resolved.

~ Sam Harris (1967-01-01 age:51)

Transubstantiation Insanity

If you think that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost you mind, but you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you are just a Catholic.

~ Sam Harris (1967-01-01 age:51)

Fig Fag

Poor Fred [Phelps] — he’s actually working on a typo and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree and there’s another place in the Old Testament — I think it’s in Psalms — where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags!

~ Thom Hartmann (1951-05-07 age:66)

Meaning of the Cross

I think it’s interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he’s really going to want to look at a cross?

~ Bill Hicks (1961-12-16 1994-02-26 age:32)

Biblical Inconsistency

[On biblical inconsistency.] Their multiple authors — none of whom published anything until many years after the Crucifixion — cannot agree on anything of importance. Matthew and Luke cannot concur on the Virgin Birth or the genealogy of Jesus. They flatly contradict each other on the Flight into Egypt, Matthew saying that Joseph was warned in a dream to make an immediate escape and Luke saying that all three stayed in Bethlehem until Mary’s purification according to the laws of Moses, which would make it forty days and then went back to Nazareth via Jerusalem. (Incidentally, if the dash to Egypt to conceal a child from Herod’s infanticide campaign has any truth to it, then Hollywood and many, many Christian inconographers have been deceiving us. It would have been very difficult to take a blond, blue-eyed baby to the Nile delta without attracting rather than avoiding attention.)

~ Christopher Hitchens (1949-04-13 2011-12-15 age:62)

Jesus the Antichristian

Love your enemies. Do good to them that persecute you.

~ Jesus
Matthew 5:44

Variants of the Golden Rule

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

~ The Golden Rule, a paraphrase of

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

~ Jesus Matthew 7:12

Holy Typo Batman

The number of dead are expected to rise.
vs
A number of dead are expected to rise.

~ Newscaster Jesus (1-12-25 AD 31-12-25 AD age:30)

You Are Not a Christian

If you ignore everything Jesus told you to do, you are not a Christian; you are just auditing.

~ Bill Maher (1956-01-20 age:62)

Pretending for Jesus

Let’s keep that our little secret, shall we.

~ Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-10-09 1944-09-27 age:53)

When Charlie Chaplin said that she was the best actress he had ever seen.

Purpose of Sex

The purpose of sex is procreation. Homosexuals have it just for pleasure. That is disgusting, immoral and unnatural. Its an abomination. I will not tolerate it. Homos should go back where they came from. They have no right to exist in this nation whose king, according to the constitution, is Jesus, forever and ever amen. Jesus never even had an impure thought, much less polluted himself or had sex. It says so in the bible, so you had better do what I tell you.

~ Ima Meddler (1929-10-29 age:88)

A few points in rebuttal:

• Nobody is asking you to have homosexual sex or even view it.
• The sex other people have in private does not affect you in the least. Stop being such a busybody.
• Most sex is for pleasure. Even straight couplings result in a child only on average twice in a lifetime.
• People do lots of things for pleasure — music, dancing, art that do not result in procreation. You are a Puritanical old biddy. If you enjoy being miserable, you are welcome to it, but please stop trying to export it to others.
• Males have a prostate gland perfectly positioned for sexual pleasure far surpassing that of vaginal sex. We humans have obviously evolved to enjoy same gender sex. Further men and women are always complaining about the different and baffling sexual responses of the other gender. Men and women breed successfully but are not all that successful at mutual pleasure because they are so different.
• Dr Bruce Bagemihl in his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity documents homosexuality in 400 species. Because it occurs in nature, it is natural. That is what the word means.
• I find your religion utterly revolting. I am sure you would too if you ever read the bible cover to cover. I would like it if every church in the world burned to the ground. However, in Canada and the USA we have freedom of religion. I am required not to interfere in any way with your filthy ritual cannibalism religious practices. And in return you are not permitted to force your religious superstitions about homosexuality on me. Freedom of religion is a truce. You chafe at not being permitted to bully others, but without it, you too would be bullied.

Jesus = Santa Claus

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.

~ Henry Louis Mencken (1880-09-12 1956-01-29 age:75)

Letters from Christians to an Atheist

Commie, Commie, Commie!… Somebody is going to put a bullet through your fat ass, you scum, you masculine Lesbian bitch!… You will be killed before too long. Or maybe your pretty little baby boy. The queer-looking bastard. You are a bitch and your son is a bastard… Slut! Slut! Slut! Bitch slut from the Devil! That’ll give you the general idea. Oh — just one more; I love this one: May Jesus, who you so vigorously deny, change you into a Paul.

~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-04-13 1995-09-29 age:76) 1965-10

No Evidence For Jesus

About six years ago, Life magazine ran an article on the historicity of Jesus and I was floored to find that they conceded the only evidence we have for his existence is in the Gospels. But don’t take Life’s word for it. In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the most definitive study that’s ever been done on the subject, Albert Schweitzer admitted that there isn’t a shred of conclusive proof that Christ ever lived, let alone was the son of God. He concludes that one must therefore accept both on faith.

~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-04-13 1995-09-29 age:76) 1965-10

But makes no sense. Why would you believe something highly improbable without evidence? Normally you demand overwhelming evidence for preposterous claims and accept only mundane claims without evidence. That is like saying you should accept the Easter bunny on faith, just because it is so pleasant to pretend the Easter bunny exists.

Jesus as Ghost Story

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.

~ Thomas Paine (1737-01-29 1809-06-08 age:72)

Jesus was Married

Jesus must have been married to have been called a rabbi.

~ Darrel Ray

Absent Minded Christians

If Jesus’ resurrection were genuine, surely the tomb would be a target of pilgrimages and extreme veneration. The Buddhists still have the Bodhi tree. Muslims have the leaping off spot to heaven. Yet Christians lost track of where the tomb was. They also lost track of the 10 commandments. Even though Moses allegedly smashed them in a fit of pique, the fragments should still be holy. They lost track of the Ark of the Covenant. They lost track of Jesus’ birthplace. The most likely explanation is these are all mythological.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acts of God

Fundamentalists like Pat Robertson never miss an opportunity to label a natural disaster such as a hurricane or flood as Yahweh’s wrath directed on whoever he disagrees with. I find it hypocritical that fundamentalists refuse to take a hint when Yahweh struck a kitsch Touchdown Jesus statue with lightning, burning it to the ground, or when hurricane Isaac smote the Republican National convention.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Afterlife

I estimate the probability of there being an afterlife to be vanishingly small, in other words for all practical purposes impossible. Why?

• The afterlife is totally unlike anything on earth. That is just not the way the universe behaves. It smells much more like a fairy story than a scientific claim.
• All the 60,000 religions disagree on how it works. No religion can offer evidence. They just speculate.
• There is no mechanism for information in living bodies to pass into eternity. When nerves rot, all your memories die. People have postulated a soul, but have no evidence for it, just wishful thinking. No known or even speculated physics could support one. There are no photos, no detections, just artists’ conceptions created purely from the imagination. The soul is claimed to be supernatural, not subject to any physical laws, in other words magic, conveniently impenetrable to study.
• The whole scheme is ridiculously unfair — eternal torture for the non-crime of failing to believe Jesus’ bullshit presented without any evidence. An omni-benevolent deity would come up with something much fairer than that. This story is the creation of some sadistic, unscrupulous con man, pulling in the marks to Christianity by hook or by crook.
• The supposed reward of heaven is a nightmare. Who could tolerate an eternity singing praises to Yahweh? That is terminal boredom. This goes on even longer than the age of the universe, with no way out.
• Nothing in nature expresses any interest in human morality. This is purely a human concern.
• The scheme handles humans only. There are other intelligent moral creatures.
• There are way too many loopholes for scoundrels to get into heaven. Heaven could not be heaven with so many scoundrels.
• There are so many competing afterlife schemes. There is nothing to recommend the Christian one over any of the others. The only one with even a scrap of evidence is reincarnation.
• It was created as part of a scam to extort people into handing over money to avoid hell. Believing the Christians is like taking Bernie Madoff’s patter as holy writ.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Age Of Christianity

We have found ancient documents from 300 BC that talk of Jesus dying and being resurrected. How could that be? He was not born until about 300 years later. These came from an early Gnostic sect that claimed Jesus was a celestial figure who never actually walked the earth. It looks like historical Jesus was constructed later to be born the prophetically magical 70 years before the destruction of the temples. There is no record of the historical Jesus prior to the temple destruction.

Did Jesus Actually Exist? 
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternatives To Christianity

Jesus/Yahweh is just one of 60,000 gods. What about the other ones? Their stories and claims are almost identical to the Christians ones. Both have the same amount of evidence. Yet Christians happily dismiss all the others without so much as a glance. How do Christians do that? What difference can they detect that allows them to accept Christian claims uncritically and reject all others without examination? Do they just refuse to look at any religion other than the religion they were given in childhood? How could they then expect me to accept Christianity if it were not given me in childhood, if that is the only way they accepted it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Bigotry

American bigots insisted Muslims move their mosque and education center far away from the World Trade Towers sight because their presence somehow desecrated the site. This is like demanding the Jews publicly atone for killing Jesus. The people at the mosque had absolute nothing to with 2001-09-11. Bigots are trying to force them to confess that they did. It is astounding how bigoted mainstream America is becoming. It is like watching the gradual transformation of Nazi Germany.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Grudges

Religions, while they provide rich traditions, encourage people to hang onto ancient grudges. The Shiites flagellate themselves over the death of Imam Hussein. The Christians flagellate themselves over the death of Jesus. The Jews still celebrate hold present the memory of the Masada mass suicide. And, of course, they still hold a grudge against the descendants of the villains in their view of the events.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Animal Sacrifice

Long ago, Christians abandoned human and animal sacrifice. There are only a few Christians today who might try to acquire a new car by slicing open their cat. However, modern day Christians make an exception for Jesus. They still believe that his human sacrifice by crucifixion magically caused good things to happen.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anomaly Me

When Christians find out I am an atheist, they often tell me that I have embraced evil, that they know for certain I molest children and steal. They could not possibly imagine me helping the poor.

They don’t know I once gave away everything I owned including a fully-paid-for four-bedroom house to help the people starving in Ethiopia.

They are confused. They think the only reason to do good is out of fear of being tortured by a sadistic sky god. Doing good is its own reward. Not only do you feel warm and fuzzy, you get to live in a world a little kinder than it once was.

They think Jesus’ philosophy of kindness to the disadvantaged is only true because Jesus was magic. I think it does not matter at all if Jesus was magic. It does not even matter if he ever existed. The philosophy can be judged and found to have merit all on its own.

The irony is so many Republican Christians embrace an ethic of selfishness and actively persecuting the homeless yet imagine themselves more virtuous than everyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist or Christian Firefighter

Which firefighter do you think will do a better job?

1. The atheist who knows if he fails to rescue the baby, that’s it for that child.
2. The Christian who imagines if he lets the baby die, it will soon be in Jesus’ crowded arms. The pain and trauma will be erased allowing the child to enjoy a heavenly existence considerably better than it would have enjoyed on earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Attraction of Christianity

Christians are lashed to their faith, not by a personal trainer relationship with Jesus, reasons, beauty, truth… but by a terror in the back of the mind, that, crazy as it sounds, Yahweh may torment them for eternity just for failing to believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Babysitter Jesus

Christians claim Jesus watches over children as they sleep, yet if they abandoned their children, even fellow Christians would condemn them as unfit parents.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bach

Bach wasted most of his life writing noodling boring Jesus-Musik.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Baffling Christians

Christians assure me that God in both his Yahweh and Jesus forms, is kind and merciful. Then they tell me Yahweh killed nearly all the humans, animals and plants on earth in a fit of pique. Then they tell me that Jesus is plotting to destroy the world, and send most folks off for eternal torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bait and Switch

I have been watching a number of YouTube debates between Christians and atheists. I notice that Christian debaters are very fond of a bait and switch tactic. It goes like this. The Christian makes an argument of the form:

• The universe blows my mind. It must have had a designer.
• The universe needs a cause. The only thing that can provide a cause that does not need a cause itself (because it is magically exempt) is god.
• If there were no god, we would have no objective morality. We would be on our own to decide right and wrong just as we decide laws. That would be awful (but surely nowhere near as awful as some other facts of existence, like mosquitos). Therefore god exists.

They then declare victory in debate and grandiosely claim therefore:

• Christianity is the one true religion. The rest are false. We don’t even need to examine them to know this.
• Jesus was the son of god.
• Jesus rose from the dead.
• Prayer works reliably.

Even if you concede their arguments, their conclusions do not follow.

It seems to me possible a god could exist yet every single religion, including Christianity, badly missed the mark in describing him since he felt the universe itself was a clear enough message and any revelation would be twisted or misused to sow dissension. I see no reason to believe at least one religion had to get it right. All of their stories sound like myths, not in the least even pretending to be factual knowledge about how the world works.

There is also the matter of disproving the truth of Judaism and Islam who lay claim or the trademarked Yahweh as well. You also have the tiny matter of which flavour of Christianity is true: the Catholics, the Mormons, the Anglicans, the Baptists, the Seventh Day Adventists, the JWs (Jehovah’s Witnesses), the Coptics, The Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox… They all claim the others are heretics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Baptism

According to the Gospel of John, John the Baptist baptised Jesus at Bethany in the Jordan River near where it flows into the Dead Sea. The site is a filthy sewer. I find it strange that Christians over the ages would not have bothered to take care of this site. Perhaps it was always thus and no one would ever have thought of bathing there. Even in the second century, the spot had been lost, and they debated about where it should be. They could have been simply looking for a plausible site to use to embellish their fictitious story of Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Barack the Antichrist

Right wing Christians assure me that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. How do they know? He did the thing Jesus would most disapprove of: heal the sick too poor to pay the doctors.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Beautiful Lies

Christians have two classes of lies:

1. Ordinary lies: about fidelity, academic credentials, wealth, stealing… These are bad lies, Christians treat them much the same way everyone else does with the exception they believe the harm of lies can be magically erased with a simple religious ceremony and a penitential act such as repeating a prayer three times.
2. Defending the faith lies: These are lies intended to defend church dogma. They may be about stories in the bible that are not there. They may be straw-man arguments. They may be lawyerly arguments intended to deceive. They may attempt to bamboozle the naïve with hoary arguments refuted a thousand times before. To the Christian, there is no shame in telling such lies. Christians don’t even consider them lies, since they defend something they presume must be true. To pull off this self-deception, Christians lie to themselves that it is impossible for them to be wrong on matters of Christianity, Jesus, god, the bible, astronomy, geology or evolution. With that infallibility, the lies are mere technical details. The big picture is certainly correct.

This tolerance for the second type of lying goes back at least to Martin Luther who said:

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Corroboration

Jesus reputedly performed three knock’m dead miracles — rising from the dead, causing an astromomically impossible solar eclise lasting many hours and covering the earth and sending an army of zombie saints to march on Jerusalem. You would have expected all 121 contempory historians to report such marvels. However, none of them did. In fact, they never mentioned Jesus. This is profoundly embarassing for Christians who deeply yearn for corroboration for the New Testament.

They respond by lying. They claim they have corroboration that they do not have. It turns out their evidence comes from sources writing centuries later, merely quoting Christian dogma. They have some earlier work, but it turns out to be obvious forgeries. Even the gospels are not eye-witness accounts. They are hearsay, based on oral transmission of the stories for a century.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Fictional Characters

How do you explain the lack of archaeological evidence to support the existence of Moses, David or Jesus? The two most probably explanations are either they never existed, or not many people at the time considered them important. Either way, the modern day characters are fictional.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Procrastination

The gospel of Mark was written 40 years after Jesus allegedly died. Matthew was written 60 years later. Luke was written 70 years later. John was written 80 years later. The authors were all anonymous. None ever met Jesus. They were not apostles. The gospels were named after apostles somewhat later. The earliest fragment comes from 125 AD a bit of Greek from the Gospel of John.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Scholars

The consensus of biblical scholars believe:

• Genesis and Exodus and are not historical.
• There is no trace of Solomon or David.
• There is no trace of a historical Jesus.
• There is no trace of Moses or the exodus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Miracle

There is no even mythical witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. That is a really thin possibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Biggest Insincerity

There is no insincerity as phony as Jesus joy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blaming the Wrong People

Some Christians say Jews killed Jesus. They then use this as justification for persecuting Jews living today, who clearly could not possibly have had anything to do with the crucifixion. These Christians are brain damaged. That is as crazy as confusing a Texan killed Kennedy with all Texans are guilty of murdering Kennedy, even ones who were not born when he was assassinated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

BS Come Lately

At the last supper, Jesus handed out bread and wine, clearly symbolically in a ceremony of remembrance of him. It was not until the 13th century that Aquinas sold the BS of communion being some magic transformation into the literal body and blood of Christ.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

BSing Christians

If Christians truly believed that a wafer converts into a bloody slice of the ancient corpse of Jesus Christ, surely they would insist on cooking it first before partaking in the cannibalism ceremony.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Caesar vs Jesus

Historians tell us that Julius Caesar miraculously calmed the seas. The bible tells us that Jesus too calmed the seas. If you are gullible enough to believe the Jesus story, you should also believe the Caesar account. After all, the Caesar account has 1000 times better provenence than the Jesus one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic Killers

Catholics condemn millions of people to death from AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) in Africa because they teach that using condoms makes the baby Jesus cry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charlatan Christians

If a man posed as a doctor, who had no medical training, who killed multiple patients and healed none, he would be in trouble for practicing medicine without a licence. Further, he would be sued into bankruptcy. But if he invoked Jesus in any way, he would get off Scott free and be free to continue practice. It is time to close this loophole for charlatans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cheesy Monuments

Christians oddly never take a hint when Yahweh smites their cheesy monuments (e.g. Touchdown Jesus) with lightning.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childish Christians

Expecting Jesus to come and right all the world’s wrongs is as childish, naïve and idiotic as expecting Superman to rescue you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Comfort

Christians often argue that they derive comfort from Christianity particularly having an imaginary invisible friend in Jesus. Therefore it does not matter if it is true. They choose to believe it is true despite the evidence. Believing things that are not true will always harm you to some extent. If, for example, you falsely believe Jesus will protect you from venomous snakes, you might be tempted to buy a pretty yellow one as a pet. If you falsely believe Jesus will answer every prayer, you may be tempted to blow the rent money on renting a sports car. If you falsely believe Jesus will protect you from criminals, you might be tempted to walk down dark alleys at 3 AM. If you falsely believe you will live forever, you might just fritter your entire life away playing video games and watching TV. If you falsely believe that Jesus would not permit calamitous climate change, you will end up living in a desolate world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Darwin Awards

67 foolish South African Christians were crushed to death when they went to see televangelist, T.B. Joshua in Nigeria who claimed to be a prophet, to know the future and to perform miracles. Multi-millionaire Joshua scrimped on construction of his hostel building and it collapsed. He told several different lies about the cause of the collapse. One of the lies was that a plane flew into the building 911-style and left no trace. He has also killed people by convincing them that giving him money for Jesus was more effective than HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus) drugs. It is amazing the crimes people can get away with if they wear the right costume.

Moral of the story: never trust a known crook with your life, a lesson too late for these gullible Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Darwin Awards

On 2014-09-22, Freetown Sierra Leone was in the middle of lockdown to control an Ebola epidemic. People poured out on the streets after a local Christian leader said on the radio that people should Come out and shout ‘Jesus, Ebola is over’!. Christians threw all caution to the wind and ignored all Ebola-control measures. These fools and their families will be soon removed from the gene pool.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Christian Excuse for Callousness

Christians try to assure me that nobody they like dies and all people they personally do not like will be tortured for eternity. They try to assure me that they are guaranteed a seat at the lunch table with Jesus. They claim this is true no matter how many biblical sins they have committed. This true even when they are not a male Jewish virgin Revelation 7:3-4.

We have absolutely no evidence any of this is so. It is just wishful thinking. Not even the various religions agree on how it works. None of them has any way whatsoever of resolving the matter. If you want to be sure the bastards are punished, you had better do it while they are still alive.

Why do Christians pretend that they know this crap is so, not just that they think it could be so? The reason is their parents abused them as infants threatening hell-fire if they fail to believe. Strong phobias like Yahweh, snakes and spiders can’t be exorcised by reason.

There are plenty of reasons to treat your fellow humans well that have nothing to do with god. For example, I sold all my belongings including a fully-paid-for 4-bedroom house and donated the money to help the Ethiopian famine. I don’t know of any Christians who did anything comparable. I did it to alleviate suffering. To me, it was as if a baby had been left on my doorstep. I felt responsible. In contrast, Christians offer a useless prayer and imagine they have helped. Prayer is just an excuse to do nothing. What useless turds Christians are!

The bible promises to answer every single prayer without exception, yet everyone knows all prayers are ignored, because it makes absolutely no difference if you pray or not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Fear Of Atheists

Christians have traditionally killed atheists, shunned them or at least made their lives unpleasant. Yet they happily tolerate whackos who claim they can cure all disease with a handful of crystals without the aid of Jesus. Why the difference? In their heart of hearts, Christians know the atheists are right. The atheists threatens their beliefs that they fear they must espouse for social, not logical, reasons. In other words, if they fail to maintain the charade, other believers will reject them. The crystal people are playing the same confidence game, just a variant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Hypocrisy

Christians berate the Aztecs for their fascination with human sacrifice, yet Judaism, Christianity and Islam all celebrate a psychotic man, Abraham, who heard voices commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but was stopped at the last minute by a voice in his head he took for an angel. The central event in Christianity was the human sacrifice of Jesus. That is why the cross is the symbol of Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Lack of Health Care

How is it possible for anyone who claims to be a Christian to oppose helping the homeless, universal medical care and old age pensions? Do they seriously want their fellows to die from lack of care? How do they reconcile that with what Jesus harped on?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Lifeboat

Imagine a lifeboat containing a mixture of Christians and atheists. The atheists are frantically bailing out the boat. The Christians are frantically dipping their buckets into the sea and pouring the water back into the boat. It is rather strange that the atheists don’t heave the Christians overboard.

What do I mean by this metaphor? Christians call for increased production of greenhouse gases on a planet threatened with climate change. Christians use violence to force people to have more children on a planet that has not the resources to feed them. Christians call for subduing nature to destroy the habitat of endangered species. Christians claim that preserving trees is devil worship. Christians claim any damage we humans do to the planet does not matter because Jesus is coming soon to destroy it all, (or possibly repair it). Some even want to dismantle secular government and replace it with a Christian theocracy, effectively a Christianised version of Shari’a law. They are homicidal lunatics. They are so familiar, we ignore how dangerous they are. They are so nuts, they yearn for the end of the world. All two billion of them have to be neutralised in some way, ideally by convincing them to give up their delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Money Con

One of the Christian scams is to convince poor people they are poor because they don’t have enough faith in Jesus and the way to prove that faith is to send money to the evangelist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Morality

Jesus says he will torture people for eternity, primarily for one crime — not believing his cock and bull story, told by anonymous hearsay. It does not matter what good works you do. How just is that? What is so virtuous about gullibility?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Nation

Christians so often assert their right to impose their religious beliefs, praying and customs on others. They justify this by saying This is a Christian nation. It isn’t. Democracies are founded on the principle of freedom of religion which includes freedom from religion. In particular, Christians chastise non-Christians for failing to honour Jesus at Christmas. How would they feel about being forced to honour Mohammed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Philosophy

The core of Jesus’ philosophy is to take no thought for the morrow. Abandon your family. Become a beggar. Almost no Christians do this. If any Christian’s son followed this advice, they would be horrified. Christians are such hypocrites to simultaneously worship Jesus and treat him like a lunatic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Roadblock to Dealing With Global Warming

Christians are a major roadblock to dealing with global warming. Some of them naïvely believe that god would not permit such a catastrophe and is thus obligated, like Superman, to perform a last minute rescue, even though there is no evidence he has done so before, e.g. the great plagues, slavery, lynchings, great wars, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Iraq… Other Christians welcome any catastrophe sufficiently nasty to be labeled the end of the world because they imagine it means the faithful will get to do lunch with Jesus (and a billion others), immediately afterwards.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Sadists

Christians are the most hateful people I have encountered. They are vicious without provocation. It is no surprise then the most popular movie ever among Christians is the ultra-sadistic The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson. There must be a strain of hate even for Jesus underneath the surface.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Salesmen

I am utterly baffled how Christians can either believe such strange things or at least pretend to. I often ask them What could you tell me that would persuade me your god exists? They usually answer something along the lines I believe in Jesus 110%. If someone wanted to convince me that a particular brand of vacuum cleaner was the best, they would be quite happy to tell me facts about it and to arrange a demo. But with deities, Christians will not give me even a single reason why such a deity likely exists. Apparently the only reason they think so is faith/wishful thinking. They convinced themselves it would be a good thing if such a deity existed. That it would be nice has nothing to do with whether the deity actually exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Terminology

Atheists, even me, often inadvertently use terminology that reinforces the Christian myth, e.g.

• blessed
• cursed
• eternal
• for god’s sake
• for heaven’s sake
• give up the ghost
• god damn you
• god when you really mean nature.
• god to refer to Yahweh, as if he were the only possible god, and as if you tacitly concede he exists, a god, one of a set of fictitious beings with certain grandiose attributes, thus stubbornly lumping the god Yahweh and Apollo always in the same category.
• godforsaken
• hell
• met his maker
• passed on
• passed over
• rest in peace
• soulless
• Speaking of Moses, David and Jesus as historical personages when the evidence is they are fictional characters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian vs Atheist Murder

Christians are under the delusion atheists are much more likely to murder than Christians. They cannot imagine atheists would have any motivation to avoid murder. Christians take murder lightly for a number of reasons:

• Christians believe when you kill someone, you send them directly to an eternal afterlife. The remainder of their earthly life is an infinitesimal proportion of the afterlife. You have not badly harmed them at all.
• Christians believe all you need is a church ceremony and a mild penance such as reciting three Hail Marys, to forgive and undo the effects of any crime/sin.
• Christians believe that everything that happens is part of god’s plan. If you murder someone, god must have approved.
• In the bible, in hundreds of places, god commands people to murder innocent people including the elderly, women and children. Murder cannot be all that serious.
• In the bible, god commands his follows to murder people who commit trivial sins such as raking leaves on a Sunday. Murder can’t be all that bad.
• Christians claim they refrain from murder only because they fear eternal torment. This is obviously not true. They obey most secular laws without any such threat. Further, they ignore 99% of the commandments in the bible, e.g. the wickedness of eating a lobster.
• Abraham, the founder of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is considered supremely virtuous because he was willing to obey a voice in his head telling him to slit his son’s throat in a human sacrifice ceremony.
• Christians are delusional. They are highly prone to obeying hallucinations or voices in their head telling them to murder. They are used to ascribing these voices to Jesus or Yahweh without evidence so fail to question demands for antisocial acts.
• If you read the bible literally, all but 144,000 people are destined for hell. No matter what you do, you are doing to be roasted. All you have to do is swear once to condemn yourself. So you might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb, and have all the sadistic fun you want.

In contrast, atheists use these reasons to avoid murdering:

• If you kill someone, you have irrevocably cut off the complete tail end of their life.
• You are morally responsible for the murder for the rest of your life. There is no possible way to change that, even reconciling with the victim’s family.
• Murder is wrong, not because some deity will punish you, but because you understand how much you don’t want anyone murdering you or your family.
• You don’t relish sharing a jail cell for the rest of your life with a large male who insists on calling you my bitch.

Those are all reasons why you would expect Christians to be much more casual about murder than atheists. But are they?

• Compare the crime rates in the Christian USA and the atheist Sweden. They are orders of magnitude higher in the USA.
• 0.7% of the federal prison population is atheist. Atheists make up 3.1% (other estimates put it as high as 25%) of the US population. There are only about ⅕ the inmates you would expect from the number of atheists in the population.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Is Not Monotheistic

Christians like to claim their religion is better than others because it is monotheistic. Strictly speaking, it is not monotheistic. They have god the father, god the son, Jesus, Mother Mary, the holy ghost, the angels, the devil, the demons, Moses and the saints. But only the monotheistic religions have crusades and jihads because their master god is petty and vain and cannot tolerate rivals That is nothing to be proud of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is Not a Special Case

All Christians are atheists with respect to the Norse god Thor and the Hindu god Hanuman. They even applaud me for being that sort of atheist. The only sense that matters to them is atheist relative to Jesus. If I were debating Hindus, then my atheism toward Jesus would be applauded or taken for granted and my atheism toward Hanuman excoriated. To an atheist like me, Christianity is just another of the 60,000 religions created by man, nothing special about it at all. Christians don’t realise how provincial they are in their debating, insisting on treating Christianity as a special case.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity: The One True Religion?

Even if there were a god, there is still the small matter of why should we think that Christianity alone of all the 60,000 religions got it right? What makes Christianity different? — The claim Jesus is God (to the Muslims he is a prophet with the same status as Moses). The problem is, the archaeological evidence says Jesus started life out as a character of fiction, with stories gradually added, hardly the evidence you would expect of the one true religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity’s Victims

A person who is not too bright or who has a tenuous hold on reality is vulnerable to Christians. He takes them literally when they tell him the devil is plotting to harm him, the devil lives in him, that he will be much happier after he is dead, that there is a bearded man in the clouds spying on him at all times, that he will be punished for eternity for masturbation or even thinking about sex or that he is personally and fully responsible for the torture Jesus underwent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Leprechauns

When I was a little boy, my dad told me a bedtime story about a man who managed to capture a leprechaun. He used intensive interrogation techniques to get the leprechaun to show him where his treasure was buried. The man then wrapped his gold scarf around the tree to mark the spot. He then somehow extracted a magic unbreakable promise from the leprechaun not to disturb the scarf. The man then went off to get something to transport the treasure. When he got back to the forest, he discovered that every tree now had an identical gold scarf. The leprechaun had kept his word. The man was a not-that-bright thug and thief who fully deserved his disappointment.

This story reminds me of Christians who tell me that I should join their religion because ancients wrote in a book that Jesus was born of a virgin, a miracle with no possible explanation other than divine intervention. What they relentlessly ignore is that those same ancients also alleged that thousands of other august people were born of a virgin too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Republicans Use the Same Con

You can see how the Christian con works most clearly in the way the Republicans played it during the 2009 health care debate. Loudly, dripping with theatrical emotion, they beseeched God to intervene to deny the poor health care. The idea was to sell the notion that health care for the poor was evil, even though Jesus himself reputedly spent most of his time healing the poor. Since God never speaks, the unscrupulous can always safely speak on his behalf.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Are Easy Marks

It is no coincidence that con men so frequently target Christians. Christian are easy marks because they have been conditioned since birth to trust someone just because they frequently say thank you Jesus. Christians have been trained to believe outlandish claims without evidence. Christians have been taught to expect fantastic rewards without effort. Christians have been instructed it is improper to ask questions or doubt authority. Christians are softened up from a lifetime of being conned by the church without complaint.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Completely Ignore Jesus

There are no Christians, only people who claim to be Christian. There is hardly a single sentence attributed to Jesus that Christians do not all ignore.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians on Fisheries

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of the Department of Fisheries he would say Kitsch all you want, any way you want. If Jesus kin find fish, they must always be abundant, maybe just hidin’.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clueless Sources

It is odd that Christians look to the most ignorant, least educated people for the source of all their information about science: Jesus, Moses, Mohammed etc. did not even know the earth was a sphere.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Competition

One of the great puzzles is, if Jesus were the most important person in the world, pulling off spectacular miracles, why did none of the 121 historians of his day ever mention him or events associated with him, like the 3-hour darkening of the sun (ok, maybe it just ducked behind a cloud), or the zombie saints, or the triumphal donkey ride? It gets stranger. There were about a dozen would-be messiahs wandering around at the time of Jesus. All of these losers made it into the history books, even though they were not a patch on Jesus. Why? The more you study, the more obvious it is that Jesus started as yet another of the dozens of mythological resurrection gods, and only later, in 161 AD at the Council of Alexandria, did his believers decide he would sell better as a historical figure.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Constantine

Emperor Constantine (274 AD 337-05-22 AD age:62) banned all religions but Catholicism. This ban included the Gnostic Christians who believed Jesus was purely a spiritual being who had never walked the earth. All the other temples were torn down or converted to Catholicism. Adherents to other religions had all their property confiscated, then they were executed. Anyone who spoke against the new law was executed. This started a reign of book burning, torture and killing that lasted 1800 years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Constantine Lie

Legend has it that Emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky and a dream of Jesus. He ordered his troops to paint crosses on their shields and they beat the much larger army of Maxentius. Then Constantine built a giant triumphal arch right next to the Colosseum in Rome. The monument depicts the battle in bas relief with not a cross to be seen. This legend is yet another Christian lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazies Treated As Sane

If someone went to a psychiatrist and announced that the spirit of a long dead shaman had taken over his body and that an invisible entity that hovered in outer space was planning to torture him for masturbating, how might he be treated? With hospitalisation and antipsychotics? Not if that shaman were named Jesus and the entity Yahweh. He would be sent out into the world as a perfectly sane man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazies Treated As Sane

If someone went to a psychiatrist and announced that they were hearing voices that told him what to do and threatened to torture him for non-compliance by roasting him alive, how might he be treated? With antipsychotics? Not if that voice called itself Jesus. He would be sent out into the world as a perfectly sane man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating Gods

The desire to create gods is innate. A child will pretend his teddy bear or pet goldfish has super powers to protect him from bogeymen. Jesus is an invisible friend for adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion is one of the goofiest stories I have ever heard. Jesus, without any history of depression, decides one day he would enjoy a painful protracted death. He goads the Romans to crucify him by breaking the blasphemy laws.

Apparently, this suicide-by-cop was to help him forgive everyone all their sins. There was no need for forgiveness. These were general sins, not sins against Jesus. Further, he could have just forgiven the sins without all the drama. Similarly, there is no need for me to forgive Hollywood starlets who insult each other. It is none of my business. It was none of Jesus’ business either.

I have forgiven lots of people, including two employees who embezzled my life savings. I did not need a crucifixion to prod me along. I did not need to sacrifice anyone else or even a goat. Why does Jesus require all this suffering? It is a masochistic delusion. It is absurd that I would be more skilful at forgiving than Jesus.

It gets even weirder. Jesus’ suffering is supposed to magically neutralise the effects of sins, of all people, for all time. Christians are implicitly endorsing human sacrifice as effective. I wonder if they think Aztecs ripping the hearts out of sacrificial victims actually helped the crops.

Suffering obviously does no such thing. When somebody murders a young child, everyone still suffers. The child stays dead. Jesus is absolutely useless. It is a nutty idea that suffering 2000 years ago has any effect on suffering today. What possible connection is there?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crucifixion

Romans used crucifixion as slow torture. It usually took the victims 3 or 4 days to die. Oddly, Jesus expired within a day. The gospels give no hint as to why he was so fragile. However, it does suggest the possibility that Jesus did not fully die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crusade Genocide

Pope Urban II sent Christians off to kill everyone, Jew, Muslim and Christian living in Jerusalem in the Crusades. He was a bit like modern Zionists, imagining he had holy title to Jerusalem, even though Christians in the time of Jesus were a tiny minority, and Muslims had occupied it for hundreds of years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dangerous Delusions

I have the same get-me-out-of-here feeling when I encounter a person who tells me that Jesus is real that I would on encountering one who assured me that Dr. Who was real. If this person is that deluded, what other dangerous notions do they harbour?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death

Christians cling to the notion that faith in Jesus or expensive coffins will protect them from death. They die just like everyone else. They rot just like everyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) What happens after you die 

Defective Eyes

If the eye were the result of intelligent design, the blind would not have to wait millennia for an appointment with Jesus. They could get them fixed in at most two appointments at the nearest shopping mall Visions outlet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Freedom of Religion

In the USA, freedom of religion means the right to praise Jesus in any way you please.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definitions of Atheist

The ancient Romans fed Christians to the lions because they were atheists, who refused to worship Jupiter and his friends. Muslims slaughter Buddhists because they are atheists, who refuse to worship Allah. American Christians persecute anyone as atheist who does not worship Jesus. Religious folk clearly use the term atheist in a much weaker sense than we atheists do. We atheists refuse to worship or even believe in the existence of any gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Demeanor

Jesus is always portrayed as wallowing in self pity. It makes me want to kick him in the pants. No other gods are such sad sacks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deprogramming Strategy

The main atheist strategy for converting Christians is to wait for one to attack and attempt to sell them on Jesus. They then try an irritable counter attack. Instead of going after the hardest nuts first, it might be more productive to go after the low-hanging bananas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discouraging Voices

Of necessity, most churches discourage people from seeking imaginary visits from Jesus or interpreting voices in their heads as Jesus. Otherwise, people will make up their own doctrines, put them in Jesus’ mouth and ignore those of the church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Divine Criss

Illusionist Criss Angel daily performs magic that is much more impossible than anything Jesus reputedly even attempted. We are supposed to believe Jesus is the son of god based on anonymous third hand reports of his performances/miracles. Then should not Criss’ performances/miracles performed live also convince us that Criss is even more divine than Jesus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Divine Displeasure?

On 2010-06-14, when lightning destroyed a 18.90 metres (20.67 yards) Touchdown Jesus statue near Cincinnati, no one invoked divine displeasure at the kitschy artwork.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Do You Believe?

Here are some questions to probe your belief in a deity:

• Do you believe a deity created the universe including itself?
• Do you believe a deity intervenes in your life changing what would otherwise happen naturally?
• Do you believe that Jesus Christ died, his corpse started to rot, then he came back to life after three days?
• Do you believe it is possible to petition a deity or other supernatural being successfully to make your life more pleasant?
• Are the clergy/pope capable of intervening on your behalf with a benign deity?
• Is there a deity that cares how humans behave?
• Does the church have special ability to guess what the top deity (if any) in the universe wants?
• It is true that there is exactly one deity in the universe and he calls himself Yahweh?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Does God Change?

In the bible, Yahweh and Jesus are eager to demonstrate their magic powers to establish their authority. Yet, oddly, today, they never do. They don’t even put in an appearance though back then they were present 24/7. Reputedly God and Jesus never change. So how do you explain this about-face?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Driving Out the Moneychangers

When Jesus drove out the moneychangers from the temple, it was actually an outdoor market covering 14.16 hectares (35 acres) surrounded by porticoes and packed with people. Imagine a single person trying to pull this off today — not very likely. They would need a gang of thugs. Further, they would not get very far before security intervened.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The End Of the World

Despite the bible verse Matthew 24:42 that says that no one knows when Jesus will return, 44% of Americans are confident Jesus will return within their lifetimes. In other words, 44% of Americans are eagerly awaiting the end of the world. No wonder Americans have no interest in preserving their forests, keeping their water clean, avoiding oil pollution, avoiding radioactive contamination, climate change… I wish these people would get on with it and kill themselves, and leave the earth to those of us who want to preserve it.

Millions of people throughout history have died awaiting Jesus, completely sure he would come at any second. They were wrong. Today’s Americans are just as delusional. Why can’t they hedge their bets a bit and leave the earth in decent shape to welcome Jesus. Trashing god’s creation strikes me as supremely disrespectful.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Environmental Vandals

The other reason I hate Christians with a burning passion is their religion makes them into environmental vandals. Their monumental conceit is obscene. They imagine the entire universe was created for no other purpose than their personal pleasure. They believe, no other creatures but fellow Christians have any inherent right to life. They believe their god Jesus will soon destroy earth, so there is no need to take care of it. They are the ultimate environmental barbarians. If they find destruction of the earth so seductive, I wish they would commit collective suicide now and let the rest of us get on with repairing the damage they have done to the earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Erasing Sin is BS

One of the most pernicious religious doctrines is that by saying some incantation or performing a bit of ecclesiastical magic, the effect of a transgression is erased. Clearly such an action does nothing to help a raped child with her trauma, or compensate a man who had his life savings embezzled. Churches assert such ceremonies will erase the deed from God’s records. This just encourages repeat offenses. Peter Cook as the Devil in Bedazzled explained the criminal strategy most clearly. Even the criminal justice system is taken in by this bullshit. They go easier on convicts who claim to have found Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Euhemerisation

In Paul’s writings, there is no mention of Jesus ever living on earth. He is a celestial being who communicates only by revelation. However, 20 years later, when Mark wrote his gospel (on which Matthew, Luke and John were based), Jesus had been euhemerised with a life on earth, a ministry and miracles, not a word of which had been mentioned in Paul. This strongly suggests that Jesus never was a historical person.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evading the Question

Christians have a strange way of persuading in debate. You ask, Why do you believe as you do? What evidence is there for your position? They reply You just want to sin. You hate god. If you don’t trust me you will be tortured for eternity, so you have better just shut up and believe without any questions. I am anointed by god. You are not. You can’t possibly understand these things until you have blind faith in me that they are true. Jesus died as a human sacrifice for your sins. You should feel guilty for your crime.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence

Even most Christians will concede they have no evidence for their beliefs. They say You have to have faith. They are asking me to simply trust them. If they have no evidence, where could they have got their certainty from? They just made it up. They generated it by mutually reassuring each other. It is ridiculous of them to ask me to treat what they admit is mere fiction, something they believe purely on intuition, as if it were irrefutable fact.

They are telling me I love this Jesus story so much, that I pretend to myself it is true, even though I have no reason on earth to believe it is so. You should too.

It is like a three-year old’s invitation to join their game of having an imaginary friend. Christians have a Let’s Pretend Club. Everything about it screams make believe but they nearly always refuse to admit it.

Even when they try to sell Christianity, they say If can get yourself to believe this preposterous story, your life will improve.. They never give reasons why the story is probably true, so they too must doubt it. They don’t believe the story either, just that others believing the story would be a good thing. It is a con. They don’t even believe the crap they are selling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence Against Yahweh

• Missing archaeological evidence for Moses and the exodus.
• Missing archaeological evidence for David and Solomon.
• Thousands of impossibilities in the Noah story.
• Lack of evidence for a global flood.
• Lack of intelligent design in nature. The design is bungling trial and error without planning.
• Wrong age of the universe.
• Flat earth. Metal canopy over earth. Celestial ocean.
• Cause of disease not demons.
• Nobody thought Jesus’ miracles were important enough to record.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence Jesus Was Not a Man

The Greek Philo of Alexandria wrote about 20 AD that some Jews believed in Jesus, a celestial saviour god, who was the son of God. This Jesus was not a man. This suggests that the stories of an earthly Jesus were composed to decorate this god, as was done with a dozen other deities of the time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of the Jesus Story

Christians never take into account that generation after generation of self-important Christians have been censoring and improving the information we have about time of Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exception to Religious Freedom

If a person’s religious beliefs require him to kill me, or to kill nearly everyone on earth, I think it would be foolish of me to respect his right to practice his religion even if I generally subscribe to the notion of religious freedom. I think he should be treated like any other lunatic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

There are all manner of Christian sects actively promoting nuclear war hoping it will mean lunch with Jesus. Watch the Max Frisch play  The Firebugs: A Morality Without a Moral about a man who refused to take pay attention to the obvious signs his lodgers were arsonists. Even though these people are religiously motivated, they are still criminally insane and society should protect itself from them. We ignore them because of their numbers, but it is their numbers that make them so much more dangerous.

Excuse for Believing Transubstantiation

Originally Christians were burned alive for expressing doubt, even if they recanted, that the wine in communion literally changes into Jesus’ blood and the wafer into his corpse. The medieval Christians has the excuse of torture for believing this blithering nonsense. What’s yours?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Explaining Death

When Christians talk to a child after someone has died, they invariably say things like: Your mother is alive; your mother has gone to a better place; your mother is never coming back; your mother is with Jesus. The child takes this lie to mean, mamma found me wanting. She abandoned me without saying anything, without even a phone call or a card. I don’t know what is the matter with me that she would do this. To the child, it is much like mom ran off with her lover Jesus and is refusing communication with the family.

Further, the child also builds up the expectation that if mum is alive, she could change her mind and come back. This makes closure impossible.

Christians tell these lies mindlessly without thinking of how much damage they are doing to the kids who take them literally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extra Gospels

Three hundred years after the death of Jesus, there were about 50 gospels. Emperor Constantine pruned them down to the four we know today. Anyone possessing one of the other gospels was killed as a heretic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Failure Of Prayer

If you are a Christian, how many times did you pray before you realised Jesus’ promises to grant every prayer were bogus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fairness

To be fair, if you want to evaluate the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus, you should use the exact same criteria you use to determine the existence of any figure in any religion. You should not bend over backwards to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Required to Assemble

Marius Forté is a Christian salesman. He says, that you have to believe in Yahweh first, or he will for all purposes not exist. Let’s say this is true. Presumably people like Mr. Forté were able to suspend disbelieve and start receiving messages from Yahweh. How does he know the source of these messages? Consider that George W. Bush attacked Iraq, allegedly at Jesus’ urging. Many people, myself included, are doubtful about the source of the voices in Bush’s head. I am similarly doubtful about Forté’s voices. If his claim were true, Forté could show us some consequence of these messages or at least share the text of them to see if there were sufficiently wise and divine to be from Yahweh. He cannot. If his claim were true, Forté would be transformed in some way for the better, but he was not. He is a remarkably rude and obnoxious bully.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith, Virtue or Vice

Is faith a virtue or a vice? Faith in hard work and study at university is clearly a Good Thing™ However, faith that a slot machine must soon pay off is not. Faith in being rescued from a boating accident is a Good Thing™, even when the odds are slim because it encourages people to persist in life-sustaining behaviour.

Faith that Jesus will come and restore all the denuded forests is a dangerous delusion because it encourages Christians to abandon stewardship of the forests. Faith in an afterlife, for which there is no evidence, encourages people to neglect the real one. Faith in clergy leads people to hand their children over to them to be molested, ignoring all the danger signs. Faith in TV evangelists leads people to hand over their life savings to these charlatans pretending to be god’s accountants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Fake Jesus

We know that Jesus looked like a typical modern day Palestinian — short and swarthy. Yet Christians portray him as a Swede, with piecing blue eyes and milk-white skin. If Christians will lie even about that, how can you expect them to tell the truth about anything else?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fictional Birth Places

Superman was raised on Krypton and Jesus in Nazareth. It turns out both were fictional places. Archaeologists discovered there was no town of Nazareth, much less a synagogue, in the time of Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Nazareth myth 

Fictitious Beings

Before I even started school, I collected evidence that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy were not real. Anyone can collect evidence that Jesus and Yahweh are not real simply by praying. Over and over again the bible promises every single prayer, (no exceptions) will be granted. Of course you find praying does nothing whatsoever to make pleasant things happen. I know with all practical certainty that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Jesus and Yahweh all do not exist. However, Christians are so fanatically attached to their pretend beings, they cling to Jesus and Yahweh even when they are even less likely to exist than the Easter bunny.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Filthy Jesus

You would not want to shake Jesus’s hand. He refused to wash his hands after defecating, and commanded his followers to do likewise. Luke 11:38

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Finding Jesus

Every once is a while some charlatan claims to have found Jesus’ bones. This is nonsense. All they have done is find a male skeleton somewhere near Israel dated some time in the first century. We have none of Jesus’ DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid). We have no painting or sculpture of him. We don’t even have a description of him. We have no provenance on his corpse. We do not even know if he was a real person. If we found a corpse we still have no way of knowing if it were Jesus. This is wishful thinking gone mad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

First Commandment

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84) asserted that believing in the trinity violated the first commandment. Jesus could not be equal to god. Christians ignore the first commandment when they worship saints, Mary, Jesus, angels…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

Granted, many Christians think freedom of religion means freedom to worship Jesus in any way you choose, but most North Americans and Europeans believe every human has a right to freedom of religion, except if they live in Africa or the middle east. They then imagine supporting oppressive religions is the best way to express their liberalism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Gaps

Christians irritate me no end when they find some obscure area in science where there are still open questions, then claim there cannot possibly ever be a solution, and therefore, stage magic from their unwashed Jesus is required. They do this even when they have not the first clue of what the problem is and clearly, neither would Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Good Reasons To Believe In God

Here are some valid reasons to believe in Yahweh:

• You pray to Yahweh and your prayers are nearly always answered. Prayers where you asked for others to be harmed are ignored.
• A bearded man in a robe claiming to be Jesus comes to your church and heals people of incurable diseases. The local hospital verifies the diseases and the cures. Granted, this person could well be an alien from an advanced civilisation with better medicine than we have.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Good Samaritan

Christians don’t seem to notice the irony that the best example of someone who was his brother’s keeper that Jesus could come up with was the Good Samaritan, a non-Christian. Even Jesus admits his religion is not necessary for moral action.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Great Minds on God

Try this experiment. Write down a list of whom you consider the ten greatest minds of all time. Then research them to find out their attitudes about religion. I think you will discover that most were atheist or were as critical of the religious practices of the day as they could get way with. This holds even if you include Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hail Mary

If Yahweh the god always answers prayer as Jesus asserted and Yahweh is 100% reliable, why do Christians refer to any almost futile action with almost no probability of success as a Hail Mary pass?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hallelujah Jesus Is a Warning

Someone who loudly trumpets his devotion to Jesus is trying to sell you the notion that he is trustworthy. We have seen how televangelists use this trust to extort money and how priests use this trust to molest children. We should look on it as a warning sign.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Healing

Christians assure me that Jesus/Yahweh is omnipotent. Jesus could, with a snap of his fingers, have eliminated both leprosy and cholera from the earth, but he chose instead to do a stage show, like Benny Hinn, healing individuals (or faking healings). If Yahweh is benevolent, why did he create so many diseases in the first place? Jesus was working against himself. Jesus could have at least taught the principles of sanitation. Instead he taught his followers not to wash their hands before eating/after defecating. Obviously, Jesus did not understand sanitation. He could not have been the creator of the universe. The creator of the universe would have to understand germs and sanitation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Healings

Jesus never managed any healings that are not also done by today’s televangalists like Benny Hinn, Earnest Angeley or Peter Popoff. We know modern faith healing is done with trickery. None of these healers ever regrew a limb or cured malaria or anything else that could be independently verified. It makes no more sense to ascribe Jesus’s healings to divine intervention than Peter Popoff’s.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven

I would have thought that the people who invented the Christian con would have made heaven more appealing. Consider:

• Your neighbours are 144,000 male virgins. Unless you are a paedophile, that sounds pretty dull.
• There is nothing to do for all eternity except play harp and sing Yahweh’s praises — infinitely boring.
• No sex. No marriage. No children. No pets. No reading. No movies. No Internet. No work… In the middle ages, heaven was conceived as just goofing off and getting fat. That has little appeal today.
• You can eat lunch with Jesus at very long tables. After a million years, his after lunch speeches get rather tedious.
• You cannot die no matter how bored or revolted you are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hell

Hell is allegedly infinite pain, worse than being thrown in to a lake of molten sulphur. It supposedly lasts forever, even longer than the age of the universe.

What finite crimes are sufficiently dire to rate infinite punishment?

• Picking the wrong religion or sect of that religion.
• Dying as a baby before the age where you can understand what it means to accept Jesus.
• Being born to non-Christian parents.
• Ever being turned on my someone of the same sex, even if you did not act on it.
• Ever being turned on my someone of the opposite sex who was not your marriage partner even if you did not act on it.
• The usual criminal acts e.g. stealing pens. And we think the Muslims are barbaric for cutting the hands of jewel thieves.

The Christian god is allegedly punishing people for nonsense, petty sins, and for thought crimes that people cannot help committing. Christians are manipulating people into handing over money by tricking them into feeling guilty. This is so dishonest. What kind of pervert supports a religion with such sick teachings?

Christian, how dare you lie to me and try to fob the sadistic tyrant who cooked this all up as loving. This is about extorting money and selling a particular church. No plausible deity would behave like a mafia don. He/she would love us at least as strongly as a human loves his pet fish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Dr. David Silverman: babies in hell 

Hiding Broken Promises

I am puzzled why Christians don’t sweep broken biblical promises under the rug out of embarrassment, the way they burned all the other false gospels. For example:

• Clearly, Christians die just like everyone else. Why keep up the absurd pretence that Christians do not die?
• Clearly, Christians have just as many troubles as non-Christians. God does not protect them from harm. If he did, Christians would get an insurance discount. Why keep up the pretence god grants special favours to Christians?
• Jesus did not come back within a generation as he promised. Why keep pretending Jesus never breaks promises including the utterly preposterous one that he will grant every prayer?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historians

There were 121 historians who lived contemporaneously with Jesus in the general vicinity. Yet not one of them mentioned the star in the east, any of Jesus’ miracles or all the graves opening. Can you imagine being a historian and leaving out such spectacular events?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Jesus

The first time anyone mentioned Jesus in the historical record was 80 years after his death. Given how many spectacular things he is alleged to have done, that suggests he must have been a character of fiction cooked up around the time of St. Paul.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Jesus

There were 121 historians who lived nearby at the time of Jesus. Not one of them mentioned Jesus. The first references were a century after his death and they were references to his followers, not Jesus himself. Given all the spectacular things Jesus was alleged to a have done, this does not compute.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Jesus

There were dozens of other dying and rising god cults predating Christianity, very simiar to Christianity. Christianity is the only one that claims their god was a historical being. During his life, Jesus made no impression on anyone. Not a one of the 121 historians of the region wrote a word about him. However, none would-be messiahs did. This suggests his magic was not that impressive. If he did exist, he was nowhere near the showman the bible makes him out to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Jesus

When the new Testament was being written, they had fierce fights about whether Jesus should be considered a historical person. The Council of Alexandria in 161 AD declared it heretical not to believe Jesus existed.

How could there even have been a debate about Jesus existing? Could you imagine a serious debate today over whether Elvis or Houdini existed? Surely, all kinds of people would have met him, or whose parents had met him. It was not that long since Jesus had reputedly died.

There were other problems with the gospels obvious even then, e.g. Jesus supposedly growing up in Nazareth which did not exist at the time. The people who wrote the gospels were unfamiliar with the geography of the holy land. They were just making it up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historicity of Jesus

None of the 121 historians contemporary with Jesus wrote a word about him. Even his supermiracles — the zombie saints, the impossible eclipse and rising from the dead impressed them. But ask a Christian about this lack of evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus, and they will tell you all these historians wrote volumes about him. They will assure you that Jesus was even better documented than Julius Caesar. Of course, they can’t provide any of this evidence, but nobody doubts it exists. Christians have a strange notion of truth. If you need facts, it is perfectly ok to manufacture them, so long they promote belief in Christianity.

As Martin Luther said What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Magic

I wonder what would happen if a group of modern magicians reproduced all the miracles of Jesus. They would probably be murdered for blasphemy. Christians are basing all their preposterous ideas on the gullibility and third hand reports of 2000 year old magic show watched by rubes completely ignorant of the techniques of magic. Christians strongly prefer a supernatural explanation to a prosaic one. They are like very young children, preferring to believe rings in the grass were caused by fairies dancing rather than fungus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Not To Persuade An Atheist

Christians usually present arguments they find convincing to persuade atheists. This is a waste of time. It is counterproductive because using such ineffective tactics labels the Christian as a nitwit. Here are some of the things not to do:

• Quote scripture

  The temptation is great. To a Christian, the bible is the ultimate authority. To an atheist, the bible is just another book of fiction, like Harry Potter. None of Jesus’ 121 contemporary historians corroborate it. Every time it discusses science, it gets it wrong. There are thousands of inconsistencies. It contains no information the creator of the universe would have to know.

• Threaten eternal torture

  There is no evidence this threat is real. It is part of a con the church uses to extort money. The Christian comes off like a Mafioso, destroying his credibility and moral authority.

• Argue You Need God

  Argue that you could not bear to live in a universe without a capricious supreme dictator. Lack of a deity does not bother an atheist. He may well prefer it that way. The universe is full of things that are both true and false and that you like and detest. There is no reason at all that something you detest cannot be so. There is no reason at all something you would like must exist. To think otherwise is childish and monstrously self-centred.

• Argue that atheists rape and murder

  This is insulting to the atheist you are trying to persuade. It is clearly not true. You rarely find atheists in prison. Norwegians (who are nearly all atheist) have the world’s lowest crime rate. Christians believe that crimes can be neutralised with some ecclesiastic magic. Christians believe that you cannot really kill people. So naturally they commit more murders than atheists. The more religious people are, the more likely they are to sexually and physically abuse their children.

• Argue the Need For A Cause

  The notion that every action requires a cause was found to be untrue way back in the 1800s. We first discovered radioactive atoms spontaneously decay without cause. Then we discovered that particles at the quantum scale spontaneously pop into and out of existence randomly, without cause.

• Obsolete Science

  Charles Darwin published Origin Of Species on 1859-11-24. In the intervening 158 years we have discovered all kinds of new information supporting it and filling in the holes in evolution. Darwin had never even heard of Mendelian genetics, much less DNA. Yet Christians persist in using ancient science, and endlessly debunked arguments to refute evolution. If you want to debate a topic in science, you have to stay current to within a least 30 years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Would You Recognise Jesus?

Since we have none of Jesus’ DNA, no photograph and no painting from life, even if Jesus did come back, would he not be mistaken for a homeless person and treated as such?. We have no photo, not even a rough description.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

Christians subscribe to the Aztec theory of morality. They believe in human sacrifice, at least in principle, at least in the special case of Jesus Christ.

Why do we punish transgressors?

• to incarcerate them so they can’t hurt anyone else.
• to cause them pain. To avoid more pain they will avoid future transgressions.

Clearly punishing some third party has neither salutary effect. Causing random pain to the universe when someone transgresses just causes more pointless pain. Christians believe giving pain to some random third party somehow neutralises the transgression. It does not. It intensifies its negative effect on the world.

Why would Christians cling to such primitive, barbaric, obviously false and pre-scientific ideas? Because Christianity is based on the notion of human sacrifice and human scapegoats. Their mothers threatened them with infinite torture if they failed to defend sick ideas like this.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

Imagine your daughter came home from a trip to a the Amazon and said I have joined a human sacrifice cult in Brazil. Parents would faint dead away, but somehow they don’t notice that is what Christianity is. Most of the old testament is Yahweh demanding and getting mass human sacrifices. The central point of the new testament is the human sacrifice of Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If God Existed, Would Life Be Like?

If god existed with the attributes claimed by the Christians then:

• Prayer should work. It does not.
• We should see the ordinary laws of the universe violated. We don’t
• We would see lightning strike TV evangelist scoundrels who use Jesus/God to milk the gullible. We don’t.
• God would intervene to help to downtrodden. We don’t.

That is evidence that the god of the Christians does not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If God Existed…

If god existed, a number of things would have to be so. However, they are not. Therefore, god does not exist.

• In many places,

  Matthew 7:7-8
  Matthew 17:20
  Matthew 18:19-20
  Matthew 21:22
  Mark 11:24
  John 14:14
  John 16:23

  These promises cannot even in theory be true.

  the bible asserts that Jesus/Yahweh answers every single prayer. Christians assert that the bible was written by god, so everything in it must be true. So we should see every prayer answered. We see none, not even the most deserving requests.

• The bible claims an utterly astounding and impossible miracle occurred when Jesus died. There was a solar eclipse during a full moon (astronomically impossible). The darkness covered the entire world (again astronomically impossible). (How would the bible authors even know if China were dark?). It claims it lasted 3 hours. Solar eclipses last only 7 minutes. There is no historical record of this amazing eclipse anywhere on earth. Mathematically you can predict future or past eclipses. There was no eclipse. In other words, the bible lied. If there were a god, and if that god composed the bible, this lie would not be there or at least the event would have been widely documented.
• There were 121 historians at the time and place of the alleged Jesus. Not a one of them ever wrote a word about him, though they wrote about similar religious figures. The bible claims, when Jesus died, the dead saints became zombies and wandered the streets. Not one of these historians mentioned this. If this story were true then surely all the historians would have mentioned this.
• The bible claims 4000 years ago, all animal species were reduced to a pair. DNA analysis shows this is impossible. If there were a god, DNA analysis would confirm Genesis.
• The bible claims god designed each species separately. We should see evidence of intelligent design. If animals were designed, the designer was grossly incompetent and had no ability to think ahead. An infinitely intelligent designer would not have made blunders such as giving humans a fragile back suitable for a quadruped, not a biped or leaving behind a vestigial organ such as the appendix.
• The bible claims the earth is 6000 years old. Counting sediment layers, counting ice core layers, radioactive dating, counting tree rings, extrapolating erosion… all insist the world in much older, estimated at 4.543 billion years. If there were a god, geology would confirm the 6000-year estimate.

My arguments counter the Christian god and what Christians claim about that god. That does not preclude the existence of some other god such as Zeus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Friend

Christians tell me they would feel bereft without their personal relationship with Jesus. In other words, they greatly value having an imaginary friend they imagine is the creator of the universe. They surely have discovered that this imaginary friend gives them zero access to supernatural power. Jesus will not lift a finger to help them in a financial or health crisis the way a real friend would. Further, unlike a real friend, Jesus knows nothing they don’t. He can’t enlighten them or give a fresh perspective. This is because he is just a part of their own mind.

A real friend is far more valuable than an imaginary friend. Christians have been tricked into valuing imaginary friends above real ones. I suppose imaginary friends never call them on their BS (bullshit).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Friends

It is fairly common for children to have imaginary friends, but when adults claim they have an imaginary friend named Jesus who tells them what to do, I worry they might be off their meds. Children know the difference between real and imaginary friends.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Friends

People have imaginary conversations with people who are not there. It can be considered a rehearsal for a conversation to come. Once they do that, it is not that big a jump to talking to dead relatives. And from there, it is not that big a jump to full blown delusion — an imaginary friend named Jesus who follows them around.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inadmissible Evidence

What is inadmissible evidence for the existence of god?

• Religious people often offer as evidence for the existence for god the fact Christians give more to charity (by that they mean tithing, which is like country club dues. It does nothing to help the poor or the general community.) It may be true they donate out of fear of their god, but they can fear equally well whether or not their god exists. Further, the statistics show atheists behave better on every measure than believers including generosity. Just compare the crime and generosity statistics of Sweden and the USA. Charity is a weak argument for forcing organised religion on people, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence of god.
• The bible is inadmissible. It has no corroboration, e.g. by the 121 historians of Jesus’ time or by archaeologists. It is full of errors. It thus disqualifies itself as an authority much less a divine one. There is not a stick of evidence the creator of the universe had anything to do with writing it and a ton of evidence that it and a ton of evidence that could not possibly have happened.
• Personal encounters with god are inadmissible. All they are is a wave of super-intense emotion. There is no miracle. There is no important information revealed. There are no witnesses. There is also the problem of John 5:37 where the bible makes it abundantly clear god never talks to people. Conceited people kid themselves the voices in their heads are the creator of the universe stopping by for tea. God never tells them a cure for cancer or how to raise $100 million to free political prisoners. God never gives them the Trump pee photos. They come away from the encounter no better informed than before.
• Science for Christians is usually not admissible. Creationists always distort science hideously to make their points. They have no honour. If they want to use science, let them accurately quote established scientists without chopping off any context that would reverse the meaning. Before they use such quotes, let them read the textbooks in full from which they were taken so they know precisely the lies they are telling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompatibility of Religion and Science

Science and religion (at least Christian biblical literalist religion) disagree on almost every point: the value of π, the shape of the earth, the geometry of the solar system, the structure of the sky, the age of the earth, evolution, Noah’s flood, Jona’s whale-watching tour, whether Noah, David and Jesus were historical figures, whether Exodus ever happened, the logical impossibility of a number of miracles (e.g. simultaneous solar and lunar eclipse, solar eclipse affecting the entire world but nobody noticed).

They also disagree on fundamental values:

Values
Science	Religion
inquiry	speculation
doubt	unshakeable faith
openness	censorship/secrecy
transparency	obscurantism
progress	tradition
innovation	stultification, worship of the past
improvement	tradition
equality	hierarchy, authority
testing	blindly trusting scripture.

Mr. Deity on irreconcilability of religion and science 
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent Personality

Christians tell me that Jesus fathered himself (I think I saw this once in a porn film). With this extreme incest, I would have expected the two them to be very hard to tell apart. They have some similarities namely a pathological desire for exclusive worship. However, Jesus has no interest in sacrifices, genocide or stoning people to death. I don’t see how they could be the same being.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inoculated

As a child, I was inoculated against Christianity by reading Olive Beaupré Miller’s The Book House for Children which was a 12-volume set bound in shades blues and greens, with volume 1 for preschoolers ranging to volume 12 for adults. It introduced me to the mythologies of the Greeks, Romans and Norse among others. These were all ripping great yarns, but obviously not true. Perseus was a far more impressive that Jesus. It was obvious that Jesus was of the same ilk.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insufferable Jesus

A Jewish mother says I worked my fingers to the bone for you, and what thanks do I get?. Jesus says I got myself crucified for you, now you are totally obligated to me. You have to do whatever I ask, no matter how crazy. No I don’t Mr. Jesus. I never asked you to pull that masochistic trip. I think it is absurd, revolting and immoral. I totally disapprove and I further totally disapprove of your nasty little power trip. Get away from me before I punch your whiny little self-pitying face in. Understand that I see Jesus only as a character of fiction that others take as real.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

When Christians defend their faith, they often claim they consider a universe coming into being by natural causes is utterly implausible. It needs an intelligent designer which they find perfectly plausible.

I reject intelligent design for the following reasons:

• It replaces a relatively simple problem of the singularity with much more perplexing ones. Where is god? How does he behave? Where did he come from? Does he espouse any particular morality? How do you detect him? Is any religion remotely accurate in describing him?
• There is no evidence of an intelligent designer’s handiwork. Life appears to have been created by the bungling trial and error of evolution. Prayer is never answered. Christians are no more divinely favoured that anyone else.
• The math and physics says the universe came into being by natural causes.
• The very notion of god is just a adult version of a childhood imaginary friend. Failure to grow out of it is infantile.
• Because of all the errors, inconsistencies and repetitious meandering, the bible clearly was not written by a deity. Everything it says about science is wrong. It is not supported by history or archaeology. It contains nothing that the designer of the universe must have known. Without the bible, Christianity has no case at all.

Christians pretend not to notice that an intelligent designer need not be humanoid, need not be male, need not call himself Yahweh, need not have anything to do with Jesus, need not have any of the attributes ascribed to him other than the ability to start universes e.g. being averse to evolution. Intelligent design is not an argument for Christianity. It could equally well apply to Hinduism or Zoroastrianism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invisible Friends

If your child has an invisible friend, should you humour her? If your adult sister (a Christian) has an invisible friend called Jesus, should you humour her?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invisible Teddy Bear

If your child introduced you to her teddy bear, but you could not see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, detect heat or cold coming from it, could not detect it with any instrument and it had no detectable effect on the objects in the room would you say it was real? If not, why do you believe Aunt Hildegard’s similar claim for her invisible friend, Jesus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Itchy Feet Truth

Christians tell me they know Jesus walked on water because they have a gut feeling it is true. That is as silly as telling me that they know some story is true because their foot itches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jack

Jack is a reclusive rockstar. Reputedly he puts on impromptu performances from time to time. The shows are spectacular. A live elephant appears out of nothing and levitates over the audience. Then the sun comes down and rests over his head. Jack has no driver’s licence or birth certificate. He appears in no databases. There are no videos, audios, photos, paintings or drawings of him. Nobody knows what he looks like. There is nobody alive or dead who has gone on the record attesting to having seen Jack. All we have are anonymous rumours, 3 or 4 deep of sightings.

Would you bet the farm that Jack is real? Christians would. We have the same information about Jack as we have about Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Jeopardy Challenge

Creationists like a play a game similar to Jeopardy. They ask you questions. If you don’t know the answer to any of them, that allegedly proves the existence of the Yahweh/Jesus tag team.

• How did life arise on earth?
• What happened before the big bang?
• What happens after you die?
• What is the purpose of the universe?
• What is consciousness?
• I read a story once in the National Enquirer that a little boy died on the operating table, went to heaven and Jesus gave him a stuffed rabbit. When they removed his corpse, there was a stuffed rabbit on the bed. That proves the afterlife, Yahweh, Jesus and the infallibility of the bible. How do you refute that Mr. Smartypants?

I can’t tell you how tall Mount Everest is. How does my ignorance in any way act as evidence for your silly religious claims completely unrelated to Mount Everest? It is bizarre to claim the existence of a deity hinges on the score some obscure atheist gets in a Jeopardy game.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus

Jesus was so ignorant he did not wash his hands after defecating. He preached that others should do likewise. That alone disqualifies him as a life coach or the son of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus the Busker

Jesus was prone to hyperbole. He was skilled at attracting and holding a crowd. He drew them in with magic demonstrations. He was homeless and poor and lived off contributions. The closest modern equivalent is a busker.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Clones

There were many earlier religions that did not catch on as well as Christianity. They had the following in common:

• The founder was born on December 25.
• There was a star in the east announcing the birth.
• Three kings came to visit.
• The founder was born of a virgin.
• The founder was resurrected.
• The founder had 12 disciples.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Real proof that Jesus was not real 

Jesus Is Crazy

According to the bible, Jesus was crazy.

• Luke 7:27calling for non believers to be brought to him to be slain.
• Matthew 10:37telling people they must hate their parents and siblings.
• Matthew 10:37telling people to get rid of all their belongings and wander about homeless.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Did Not Die

If Jesus is Yahweh, he is immortal. It would then have been impossible for Jesus to die on the cross. Those who claimed he was dead and put him in the tomb must have been mistaken. His resurrection then, was no big deal, since he never died.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Evidence Quality

None of the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus is of sufficient quality to be admissible in court. It is all hearsay, and multi-hand anonymous hearsay at that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus H. Christ

When Christians start babbling about Jesus and God in an emergency, I find it as idiotic as if they had started reciting the dogma of the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Focus! you dingbats!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus in India

When people in India have an encounter with Jesus or Jesus talks to them, for some reason he looks like an elephant and asks them to call him Ganesh. Indians are positive these encounters are with Ganesh. North Americans are positive those are with Jesus. Why is everyone so sure they are not just hallucinating or talking to some supergod who appears in whatever form the devotee expects?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Meek And Mild

Yahweh murdered people thousands at a pop, but he did not have a hell. Roasting people alive for eternity for not believing him was Jesus’ idea.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus as Moral Leader

I claim Jesus was not an acceptable moral leader. Why?

• Luke 16:17: Jesus commands people to obey every single tittle of the old testament, no matter how barbaric.
• Matthew 10:35-37: Jesus admits his mission is to make family members hate one another, so that they shall love him more than their kin.
• Jesus repeatedly makes false promises that Yahweh will grant every single prayer without exception.
• Matthew 5:28: he condemns everyone to hellfire by equating being turned on with adultery.
• Jesus fails to condemn slavery.
• Matthew 10:37-39: you must give up your occupation, home and supporting your family and wander the streets as a homeless beggar, contributing nothing to society.
• He pretended to know far more than he actually did. For example, he lead his followers astray by telling them to no longer wash their hands before meals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus or Mithras?

It is almost a coin toss in history whether today we would be discussing Jesus or Mithras.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Prevents Pillaging

Claiming that we should believe in Jesus/Yahweh because if we don’t we will rape, murder and pillage is like saying that Santa Claus is real because if kids did not believe in him they would not clean their rooms. Further, secular societies like Sweden are much better behaved than Christian ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus vs the Church

It is so odd that Jesus would preach you are your brother’s keeper, but the Christian right and the Republicans preach every man for himself and the poor should effectively tithe to the rich.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus Is Watching You

When a Christian says Jesus watches over me every second of the day and protects me from all harm. he does not mean this as literally true. He is well aware that just as much misfortune befalls him as befalls his atheist neighbour. What he means is thinking this thought creates intense warm gooey emotions. The intensity of the emotion is what makes something true in the Christian sense. Atheists find this baffling. They are unwilling to suspend disbelief. To understand what the Christians are up to, atheists must try to imagine how they would feel if the statement were indeed literally true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus the Zombie

If you think about it, Christians claim that Jesus was a zombie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Birthday

Jesus went without a birthday for 325 years until 325 AD when the church assigned December 25 to coincide with Saturnalia and the solstice festivities of other religions.

• Originally, Superman did not have a birthday either because he was a fictitious character. In 1990-07, the authority, Action Comics, set it as February 29. They later changed it in 2009 to December 1. Could it be Jesus too had no birthday for so long for the same reason?
• Could it be because everyone, including St. Peter’s church, forgot the actual birthday of the most important man in history and the church had to assign him a new one? This seems unlikely given all the other information about him they claim to have recorded accurately.
• Could it be because the story of Jesus is a myth that encodes facts about the movement of celestial bodies? Because of its astronomical significance, December 25 was all along part of that myth, but not revealed generally. There never was a historical Jesus any more than there was a historical Superman.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Broken Promise

Jesus claimed he would return to earth within one generation. He did no such thing. He promised a miracle and did not deliver. Yet all Christians pretend not to notice, as if it would be disrespectful. They made up stories about the second coming to cover for the failure.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Delusion

Jesus believed that diseases were caused by demonic possession. This is the guy who supposedly designed the entire universe and he knew nothing of microbes?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Lost Status

One of the things that does not make sense in the Jesus story, is he starts out hailed as the Messiah. Three kings come with costly gifts. The heavens put on a show. He makes one appearance as a child prodigy. Then black out. He resurfaces as a sort of St. Francis of Assisi figure, a homeless person with a gaggle of friends, preaching to whomever will listen. What happened to his exalted status? Why has everyone forgotten he is the Messiah?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Miracles

Here is why I don’t think the miracle stories about Jesus in the bible are true. I don’t even think Jesus was a historical person.

• There were 121 historians contemporary with Jesus. None of them mentioned any of his miracles, or Jesus himself. However, they did mention other would-be messiahs. Jesus allegedly performed three supermiracles: the zombie saints, the impossible, unscheduled solar eclipse that covered the earth and lasted much longer than astronomically possible and rising from the dead. Even these miracles did not impress the historians enough to make a note. The most likely explanation is the miracles never happened.
• There were people in 500 BC worshipping a spiritual Jesus and his death and resurrection. It seems plausible his followers composed an earthly life for him, around 100 AD complete with miracles.
• There is a counterfeit short commercial for Christianity inserted into historian Josephus, but this was written long after Jesus’ death. Josephus never saw Jesus. He just knew Christians worshipped him, a fact not questioned by anyone.
• Early Christians fought over whether Jesus was a purely spiritual being or whether he had actually walked on earth. In 325 AD, Emperor Constantine settled the matter. He had documents and people who claimed Jesus was a spiritual being destroyed. If Jesus were an actual person, I find it very odd there would be any debate about his existence. If even the early Christians were debating the matter, it is premature to consider the issue closed.
• The life of Jesus contains some peculiar errors. He allegedly grew up in Nazareth, a town that did not exist until later. The statements about when he was born relative to Herod and Cyrenius are mutually incompatible. It makes reference to a census that never happened. It is though whoever wrote the biography of Jesus did not know very much about life in Judea in 0 AD.
• There are 7.601 billion people living on earth right now. None of them can raise the dead. None of them can cure leprosy with a touch. None of them can rise into the air. I thus suspect either the miracles were tricks or tall tales. After all, these miracles are contrary to the laws of physics. They are impossible for humans to perform.
• The New Testament was not written until well after Jesus’ death. It was five-deep hearsay from anonymous witnesses. If you have ever played the party game telephone, you know how scrambled a story gets after it is retold five times in a chain. You can’t even trust a grocery list with that much scrambling. So it is preposterous to take reports of impossible events at face value.
• Anything written about Jesus prior to 70 AD spoke of Jesus only as a disembodied spirit. Only after 70 AD did they talk about events of his human life.
• The gospels were written in the order Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. With each retelling, the story gets embellished with more miracles and more impressive miracles. This sounds like the story-telling tradition, not hard history.
• St. Paul talks only of a spiritual Jesus. He makes no references to his earthly life.
• In the day, it was traditional to compose biographies of cult leaders complete with a set of miracles, including the mandatory virgin birth and rising from the dead. Why would Jesus be any different?
• Yahweh is preposterously partial to the Jews, to the point of commanding them to kill everyone else. The god of the universe is the god of everyone. It is ridiculous he is more partial than a Real Madrid fan. He is not behaving like a father. If Yahweh is a fraud, then so is Jesus.
• Yahweh is allegedly the god of the entire universe. He allegedly has infinite resources. Allegedly he had an extremely important message he wanted to deliver to mankind. He decided to deliver it solely to a tiny, backward, illiterate desert tribe. Allegedly, he went to elaborate efforts to convince them he really was who he claimed. Then he expected the rest of the earth and the rest of time to believe garbled, fifth-hand, anonymous accounts without any authority or evidence. It is a joke. The real deity of the universe would have his act together to make sure each generation got the message with his clear signature on it, not leave it up to an obscure faith healer who no one noticed during his life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Obscurity

If Jesus had a kickoff with three kings coming to visit, with his own star, how could he slip into obscurity for 30 years? That does not add up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ The Reneger

Most of the promises Jesus made have to do with what happens after you die. You cannot very well check up on him. However, he did make two promises you can check up on:

1. that he would return within a generation of those living at the time he did.
2. that god would answer every single prayer, no exceptions.

He did not keep either of these promises. He has blown his credibility. The rest of his promises are similar hot air.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Resumé

Imagine you were an employer and you got a resume in the mail from Jesus. He communicated via his televangelist agent. He was not prepared to show up for an interview in person or to talk on the phone. There was no photo and no personal details. When you checked up on his references, they said they had never met him. He claimed to have supernatural powers, but he was not prepared to demonstrate them or show any evidence of them. He claimed to be invisible, and any work he would do for you would be undetectable. He said you must have faith in what he says, or else.

He was running an extortion scam. He threatened if you did not hire him and pay him 10% of your lifetime income for protection money, his associates would torture you by roasting you slowly on spits. In his typical style, he offered no evidence of having tortured others who had refused because, get this, he did it after they were dead. What a bone-headed threat! What a bluffer!. Then in a hissy fit, he preposterously exaggerated that he would torture you forever, even after the universe ended. Not even the Mafia does that. When I phoned them, the police were not interested in prosecuting the extortion racket. His people have infiltrated all levels of government, like Enoch Thompson in Boardwalk Empire.

This metaphor sounds far fetched? To Christians, murder and rape are forgivable but the most unforgivable sins are to belong to some other religion or to find the Christian pitch ridiculous. They punish those sins with threats of eternal hellfire. An astounding number of people are taken in my these empty threats. Would you want this criminal Jesus on your payroll?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’ Return

The Seventh Day Adventists confidently predicted the return of Jesus within a generation of the 1833 meteor shower (rather than within a generation of his crucifixion as originally planned). In 1933 the prediction was quietly dropped.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jesus’s Limitations

The three big killers in biblical times were malaria, typhoid and tuberculosis. Jesus never even attempted to cure these disesase. He could not. Biblical faith healers and modern faith healers alike fail using psychological techniques. Jesus knew nothing of medicine or sanitation that ordinary folk of the time did not know. He had no god-like knowledge. Ironically, you, dear reader, know hundreds of times more about medicine and sanitation than Jesus. Why are you bowing to him? Richard Carrier: Jesus’ un-godlike limitations 

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just How Crazy Is Christianity?

Even if you are an atheist, it is hard not be unconsciously influenced by the reverence our Christian culture has around the names Yahweh and Jesus. This helps mask what utter nonsense Christians bandy about. To help make it clearer just how silly Christianity is, try substituting the name Oogabooga for every instance of Yahweh or Jesus. It will make it more obvious how much Christians assert out of thin air without any hint why what they claim might be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kalām!

William Lane Craig is fond of the Kalām philosophical argument for the existence for god. It is sometimes known as the cosmological argument. It was devised in the 19th century by an Islamic theologian Sayyid Ahmad Khan who called it jadid ’ilm al-kalam. It goes like this: Why do we have something rather than nothing? If the universe began in a Big Bang, then what caused the Big Bang? Something must have started the ball rolling. That something could only have been God, in particular Yahweh.

I see several problems with the Kalām argument:

• The Kalām argument ignores the century old findings of Quantum Mechanics that most events do not have a cause and that particles pop and out of existence all the time without cause. Further, the universe was smaller than an atom at its birth. Quantum effects at the birth of the universe must be considered.
• The Kalām argument uses the word cause without giving it a precise definition. There is far too much slop in the ordinary English definition to use the word mathematically. It is primarily a word of the legal profession, not physics.
• The Kalām argument ignores the possibility of multiverses spawning new universes.
• The Kalām argument is inconsistent. It claims the universe appearing from nothing is impossible, but a god appearing from nothing is obvious. It claims the universe appearing from nothing is impossible, but a universe appearing from nothing if a deity waves a magic wand is obvious. This is an argument from ignorance. What Craig means is his intuition feels overwhelmed by considering such big questions. He has no evidence one way or the other what is truly possible.
• Even you accept the necessity for a creator of the universe, that puts no constraints on the properties of that creator. It need not be even remotely like the way Yahweh/Jesus is depicted. It may have created the universe, then retired from interaction with it. It may have no interest at all in humans. It may have allowed life to evolve without interference. It may have been as abstract as a principle without anything remotely like a personality. Craig tries to fool you into thinking Kalām necessitates Jesus, the virgin birth and the resurrection. It could just as easily have been Star Trek’s Q and the Continuum by his argument.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Killer Jesus

Even if you accept that Jesus miraculously healed people, on balance he killed millions more. How could that be? Jesus persuaded people that hand washing was not necessary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lack Of Foundation to Christianity

• None of the 121 historians of the time and place of Jesus reported a single incident about him. Yet, they reported on other similar figures. They did not even report astounding miracles like the saints raising from the grave or the impossible eclipse.
• There is no corroborating secular evidence for anything in the New Testament. The only evidence for the existence of Jesus is the bible itself.
• The gospel of Mark was written 40 years after Jesus allegedly died. Matthew was written 60 years later. Luke was written 70 years later. John was written 80 years later. The authors were all anonymous. None ever met Jesus. They were not apostles. The gospels were named after apostles somewhat later. The earliest fragment comes from 125 AD, a bit of Greek from the Gospel of John.
• Christians claim Yahweh wrote their bible, but there is no evidence at all for that. The bible is full of scientific error. Surely the creator of the universe would get the details of creation right. Further, the bible contains reference to nothing a creator would have had to know to create this universe such as the elements supernovae, galaxies or quantum mechanics.
• The quality of the most of the writing in the bible is mediocre. It is nowhere near as good as Shakespear’s. Surely a god would do better.
• The four gospels contain almost nothing in common but overall plots. They differ in every detail. This is not reliable testimony. If god truly were the author, surely he would have been consistent.
• Since the bible itself has no foundation, quoting the bible is not a valid way to establish truth or argue the validity of Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lack of Historical Record

There were 121 historians in the region in Jesus’ alleged lifetime. Yet they recorded not even the mind blowing miracles like the global solar eclipse that went on an on. Science says one is always local and lasts only a few minutes. They did not record the zombie saints coming out of their graves. They did not even record the existence of Jesus though they recorded the existence of like men.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Late Night TV Lies

It burns me up that companies are allowed to sell products that bear no resemblance to the way they are advertised on late night TV infomercials. We let them get away with every imaginable deception. In that I include free religious products such as miracle green prosperity handkerchiefs, miracle healing manna bread offered and magic red blood-of-Jesus anointing oil in return for tithes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leave Us Alone

Christians complain that atheists like to write books and make YouTube videos attempting to pry them loose of their religious superstitions. The Christians argue Surely people have a right to believe whatever nonsense they please. Atheists might respond: The atheist YouTube and book-writing resistance is considerably more polite than going door to door or flooding the airwaves with Christian propaganda so thick you cannot avoid it. It is not your beliefs that are the problem, it is what you do as a result of those beliefs. For example:

• Most of the climate change deniers are Christians. They hold their false ideas for religious reasons for which they have no evidence. They are rapidly making the planet uninhabitable.
• The USA has made harassing homosexuals and denying them service legal if you are a Christian. This undoes 45 years of civil rights progress.
• The Catholic Church is still assisting priests to molest children.
• Christians are vilifying and killing Muslims.
• Christians have taken over the White House and are dismantling all scientific research.
• Christians force creationism to be taught in place of science in schools.
• Christians abuse and permanently scar their children in the process of indoctrinating them with religious bullshit. see Jesus Camp 
• Christians kill their children with quack medicine and useless prayers.
• Christians work to destroy the public school system and replace it with religious schools.
• Over half of American Christians believe the earth will end in their lifetime, so there is no need to take care of the environment. They are actively, gleefully trashing it.
• For religious, anti-scientific reasons, Christians believe contraception and abortion are not permissible even to save life and that this religious rule should apply to everyone in every country.

Believing things that are not true necessarily cause Christians to do crazy things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lesson of Jesus

Miss Higginbottom: Class, what’s the great lesson that Jesus teaches us.
Liam: It is easy to make grandiose promises, but a lot harder to keep them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Letting paedophilia Slide

Every day priests rape young kids and tell them it is god’s will, or that god will kill them or their parents if they tell. The Catholic church aids and abets them and covers up for them if they are uncareful. Why do you permit the Catholic church to get away with these day after day?

• Men of god need a little fun.
• You are afraid god will get you if you interfere with his fun.
• Silas scared the bejesus out of you. You don’t want him after you.
• You are too busy to do anything.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Literal Truth

If you are a Christian, do you believe the story of the prodigal son is literally true, or that Jesus just made up the story to illustrate a point?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Loaves and Fishes

When Jesus miraculously served hors d’oeuvre for 5000 there would have been nothing to it if the bread were stale and wormy and fish decomposing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Longing For Death

How crazy are they? There are a group of Christians trying to breed a red heifer to fulfill a biblical prophesy that will let them destroy an ancient Islamic mosque, start a global thermonuclear war and have lunch with Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying for Jesus

Is it not odd that a Christian would lie and cheat to promote what they considered a moral system? It is as though they don’t really believe what they are promoting is holy, true or good. They promote it for some dark motive, perhaps financial.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying About Jesus

Many Christians claim that the evidence that Christ was a historical person who rose from the dead is either incontrovertible or not debatable. Incontrovertible means not able to be denied or disputed Surely those Christians are aware that billions of people do dispute those claims, far more than those who accept them. So they are telling a bald-faced lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magic Jesus

What if Jesus has chosen different magic tricks e.g. turning a carrot into a rabbit, sawing a woman in half, making a tiger disappear? Would Christians have been as willing to invoke the supernatural to explain them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Married Jesus

In a fourth century papyrus gospel document, Jesus refers to having a wife named Mary. Given that rabbis of the time were always married, this makes more sense than the claim he was single.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Minerva Sulis

In 2000, I took a museum tour of the Roman Baths in Bath England. They dated from the Roman conquest. At one point I saw a metal mask of the goddess Minerva Sulis. It is the only time in my life I felt religious awe. It was as though time stopped and she held me locked in her gaze. She seemed to be alive. Maybe this is how Christians feel. However, Jesus, to me, is like cold, sweat-scented, greas1y toast.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Miracle Problem

Jesus allegedly performed miracles. He announced that his followers would be able to perform even more impressive miracles. Here we are and no miracles at all. Jesus clearly did not know what he was talking about. How can people claim he was a god?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Description

Why is there no description of any kind of Jesus’ appearance? I think it is because Jesus is a purely mythological figure. He never had an appearance. Compare that with other description-less characters in fables. Why not a single bust?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Holy Artefacts

Could you imagine people losing track of where Elvis is buried? How then was it possible to lose track of Jesus’ tomb? or where Noah’s ark landed, or where Moses received the Ten Commandments? Surely The Ten Commandments, the Ark of the Covenant or the cross, or the shroud, would have been fiercely guarded. We have no idea what happened to them. Maybe we don’t have them for the same reason we don’t have Paul Bunyan’s axe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Holy Objects

Consider the most important Judeo-Christian objects: the tablet containing the ten commandments, the ark of the covenant, the cross Jesus was crucified on, the nails, the stone closing Jesus’ tomb. These are all lost. You’d think a god as reputedly powerful as Yahweh, could have arranged to preserve them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Key Figures

There is no archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses, David or Jesus, yet there is for key figures of other religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mithras

Christianity is a clone of the earlier Mithraic religion. Mithras was born on December 25. He performed miracles including turning water into wine. He had twelve disciples. He was crucified, died and rose on the third day. He asked his followers to perform ritual cannibalism by drinking wine as his blood and bread as his body. Sacrificing bulls was central, also central to the Jews, but less common to the Christians. This similarity suggests to me Jesus was not a historical person, but rather an adaptation of the earlier myth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Moral Responsibility

Christianity has some very strange teachings about moral responsibility, for example:

• I am responsible for Jesus’ death by torture, even though I was not born at the time and even though had I been born at the time I would have disapproved.
• A priest who rapes a child bares no moral responsibility, so long as he confesses the crime to a fellow paedophile.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

More Evidence for Elvis than Jesus

Christians refuse to acknowledge that there is far more evidence for visitation by extra-terrestrials or that Elvis lives than there is for anything claimed about Jesus. At least for extra-terrestrials and Elvis we have thousands of living witnesses who can be cross examined. For Jesus, there is just one book written anonymously which is full of error any place it can be cross-checked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mother Theresa

Mother Theresa had hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, given her by many unsavoury characters whose reputations she enhanced with photo opportunities (and by millions of dupes like me). She had plenty of money in the bank for medicine, clinics, pain killers, doctors…

But she just sat on it. Out of her religious mania and stinginess, she refused painkillers even to those dying of pancreas cancer. She feigned poverty to bring in still more money.

Her political agenda of anti-abortion, anti-contraception and encouraging the poor to passively accept suffering as Jesus’ kisses was the priority, not alleviating suffering as most people presumed.

Yet when she was sick, she got the finest medical care available. The money also went for solid gold altar decorations in her missions throughout the world. Christopher Hitchens detailed her many crimes in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mother Theresa

Mother Theresa stocked painkillers no more potent than aspirin even though she was caring for people dying of cancer. Her workers just rinsed syringes under cold water rather than sterilising them or using disposable needles. When people complained of the pain, they were told they were blessed to share the suffering of Jesus on the cross. She told them the pain was Jesus’ kisses. She begged poverty as her excuse for not caring for her charges even though she had ten of millions in the bank.

The money went for gold altar ornaments for her various religious houses. She enjoyed poverty and suffering and inflicting it on others. She equated it with godliness. She was a masochistic, sadistic old fraud. Christopher Hitchens detailed her many crimes in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. The irony is she is being made a saint even though she confessed she lost her belief in god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

Mother Theresa

Mother Theresa is usually touted as the best Christian. Yet she was bonkers. She refused to spend the millions she accumulated for steam to sterilise needles. She refused to buy pain killers even though some of her charges were dying of some very nasty cancers. She would tell people screaming in agony that they were fortunate to share the suffering of Jesus on the cross. The pain was like little kisses from Jesus. She insisted her nuns whip themselves every day. She was twisted, harbouring S&M (Sadism & Masochism) fantasies. Christopher Hitchens detailed her many crimes in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

Pope Francis, racing to canonise her on the flimsiest of miracles, will embarrass the church for all time to come. She did not even believe in god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Myth or Fiction

One winter, shortly after P. dug Lake Michigan as a drinking hole for his blue ox, B., he decided to camp out in the Upper Peninsula. It was so cold in that there logging camp, that one evening, the temperature dropped to -56°C (-68°F). Each degree in the camp thermometer measured sixteen inches long and the flames in the lanterns froze solid. No one, not even P., could blow them out. The lumberjacks didn’t want the bunkhouse lit at night because they wouldn’t get any sleep. So they put the lanterns way outside of camp where they wouldn’t disturb anyone. But they forgot about the lanterns, so that when thaw came in the early spring, the lanterns flared up again and set all of northern Michigan on fire! They had to wake P. up so he could stamp out the fire with his boots.

Even if you are not familiar with this story from your childhood, you can tell it is a tall tale. Similarly, anyone coming from a non-Christian country, knows the stories about Jesus are similar, more subtle tall tales. The only people who take the Jesus stories seriously are those who were repeatedly told as children that the stories were true and were threatened with eternal torture if they doubted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mythicists

The following biblical scholars believe there never was a living man Jesus who walked the earth. He started out as a celestial Jesus. The details of his life were composed later.

1. Tom Harpur (1929-04-14 2017-01-02 age:87)
2. Michael Lawrence
3. Robert M. Price (1954-07-07 age:63)
4. Dr. Bart D. Ehrman (1955-10-05 age:62)
5. Dr. Hector Alvalos (1958-10-08 age:59)
6. D. M. Murdock (aka Acharya S.) (1961 2015-12-25 age:54)
7. David Fitzgerald (1964-12-26 age:53)
8. Dr. Richard Carrier (1969-12-01 age:48)
9. Timothy Freke (1981-07-01 age:36)
10. Peter Gandy

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mythicists

Mythicists are historians who think it unlikely there ever was a historical Jesus. He was a purely celestial god. Only after 70 AD, a branch of his followers composed a life for him, complete with 34 miracles. With less controversy, they assert Moses, Saul and David were mythical too.

Mythicists include:

Richard Carrier	On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith.
Robert Price	Holy Fable: The Old Testament Undistorted by Faith (Volume 1).
David Fitzgerald	Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. I (The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion) (Volume 2) Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. II (The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion) (Volume 3) Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. III (The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion) (Volume 4)
Tom Harpur	The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light.
Michael Lawrence	Contra Ehrman: Jesus Did Not Exist Jesus did not exist — just suppose.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Naïve Ratzinger

Pope Ratzinger pretends to be more gullible than a 4-year old at birthday party. He claims Jesus, an invisible magician, converts a wafer into his own corpse. The wafer looks no different. There is no corpse anywhere to be found. These inconsistencies in the magic trick as advertised and the magic trick as performed don’t seem to embarrass Pope Ratzinger in the least.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Hope If Deities Persist

Christians try to convince us that without (belief in) god, there is no hope. I say that if we cannot outgrow our belief in deities, we are soon doomed to extinction. The problem, for example, is Christians believe the mythical supernatural Jesus will magically come to their rescue. Humans don’t have any responsibility for looking after the planet. They are like helpless infant zoo monkeys. They can burn all the oil, pollute the oceans, destroy the soils, overpopulate like rats, convert the fossil fuels to greenhouse gases, cut down the forests, hold a nuclear war etc. and Jesus will magically come along like some cosmic janitor and clean it all up. He never has. No deity ever has no matter how badly we messed up. That is insane wishful thinking. It has lead to monumental infantile irresponsibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Virgins

Christians have an obsession with virginity because, in their myth, Jesus’ mother was a virgin and Jesus himself remained a virgin. They try to force this religious superstition on others in the name of sex education. Amusingly this notion of the virgin birth got started because of a mistranslation of the Hebrew word almah(maiden) into the Greek word parthenos(virgin). Further, all rabbis were married in Jesus’ time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Selfish Gene

No-Show Jesus

Jesus promised he would return shortly. The early Christians took him at his word. When he did not show and did not show, St. Paul had to keep making excuses, as have theologians to this day.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nobody Has Come Back From Being Fully Dead

Nobody has ever had after life experience and come back to tell about it. Everybody who reported some strange experience had one with a non-rotted brain then came back to full consciousness. They may have had an experience on the way in or out of anaesthesia, but they still had it with a living brain. Those who had one with a supposedly quiet brain may have actually had the experience on the way in or out of the state, or it may be possible for humans to have experiences with quiet brains. This is still far from having one with a dead/decomposed brain.

Further, these so-called after-death experiences can be generated with nitrous oxide, with centrifuges or with oxygen deprivation. In these conditions the brain starts firing wildly, creating spectacular fireworks of experience and often an oceanic feeling of bliss and oneness. Neither death nor Jesus is needed to create it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Historical Miraculous Jesus

Christians get so upset when people question whether Jesus was actually a historical figure. If he were not, would he not be billed as ever the more miraculous? as someone who existed, but without a physical body or some similar nonsense?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Sequitur Christianity

Brain-damaged Christians such as Phil Robertson, the Duck Dynasty guy, will at the drop of a hat emit a great string of non-sequiturs about Christianity, as if he were a talking doll and his string had been pulled.

In his babblings are claims that spilling blood undoes the effects of wrongdoing. It does no such thing. You cannot completely undo the effects of wrongdoing, but you can apologise and make restitution. More killing is just more wrongdoing. It does not undo harm in the least.

Another weird idea is scapegoating. Instead of punishing the wrongdoer, you punish some innocent human or animal instead. That makes no sense. Punishment then fails to act as either a deterrent or to convince the wrongdoer to stop harming. It is just plain nutty.

Mr. Robertson will also repeat endlessly that Jesus rose from the dead, never offering a scrap of evidence to support that amazing assertion. He repeats his creed so often because it is so unbelievable. If he fails to stop brainwashing himself he fears he will lose faith in the nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Just Debunking God

I think we atheists have been rather flat footed in our attempts to eliminate religion. We focus all our efforts on one thing: debunking the belief in a supernatural god.

There are many more things holding religion in place. It may have many other places to attack where it is considerably weaker, for example:

Why do people go to churches, really?

• They are lonely and churches will pretty much accept anyone.
• They want others to perceive them as good people. They are covering up something.
• They realise they have made a mess of their life and want somebody else to take it over.

What disgusts people about their religions?

• Paedophile clergy.
• all this emphasis on raising money so the pastors can live in luxury.
• phony faith healing.
• pro war, pro greed philosophies diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.

The important thing is not so much to eliminate belief in the supernatural as to break the power of the church to make people do evil things by exploiting the fear of the supernatural.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Much of a Splash

Jesus does not appear is the secular record until 100 AD, long after his death. This is odd given how many news-making spectacular things he reputedly did during his life and just after his death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Really Monotheistic

Judaism and Christianity are not strictly monotheistic. The are henotheistic. They have one main god and many demi-gods such as Satan, Jesus, the angels, the demons etc.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Odds of Supernatural Beings Existing

Think of how many proposed supernatural beings there are: all the 60,000 gods, Allah, bigfoot, centaurs, Cyclops, fauns, Ganesh, Yahweh, Jesus, leprechauns, Loch Ness Monster, Pegasus, satyrs, unicorns, yetis, Zeus… Even Christians think nearly all of them are fanciful. We atheists think they all are since there is no evidence for them and the class as a whole has a pretty bad track record for existing. Even the odds of the Loch Ness monster existing are far better than Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Offerings

If you give an offering to Jesus, Jesus will never touch it. The person asking for the money is the one who is going to spend it. Look at a photo of their home, car, pool and jet. Why do they need to live in luxury like that? That’s not god’s work by a long shot. There are many more efficient ways to spend your money on god’s work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Joyce Meyers 

Only Jesus

If you have trouble proving there could not possibly be a god, Catholics will claim victory over you. But they did not just claim there might be some sort of god out there, perhaps Ganesh the elephant god or Sulis Minerva (the electrifying god worshipped at Bath in Roman times). They made much more specific claims about the nature of that god, e.g. Noah’s flood, that Moses hung out with the Egyptian royal family, that Moses allegedly lead people wandering in the wilderness for 40 years eating nothing but fungus. Each of those claims is quite is easy to show is not true. Catholics also make demonstrably untrue god-related claims about cosmology, geology and biology. The evidence is mounting Jesus was a fictional character, something like Nasrudin or Superman. Gradual development of the myth over time, starting with the Sayings of Jesus is what the latest documentary evidence points to. The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Transplant

Imagine a heart transplant were underway. A woman bursts into the operating room, snatches the heart from the surgeon, and throws it on the ground and stomps on it.
The surgeon says Why did you do that? You have effectively murdered my patient.
The woman replies I am a Christian. My religion insists that all organs be destroyed on death.
The surgeon says That is nonsense. Organ transplantation did not exist in biblical times. Your religion could not possibly have such a policy.
The woman replies That is my husband’s heart. I can do with it as I please.
The surgeon says You stupid malicious bitch. Your husband is dead. He does not need his heart. We could have saved this man’s life with that heart had it not been for your vandalism. Fuck your idiotic religion! Why don’t you roast it and serve it with a nice Chianti and pretend it is Jesus’ putrefied corpse? you deluded homicidal cunt.

The Christian typically commits this crime in a no-so-dramatic way, perfectly legally. They simply refuse to register for donation, and they lobby to make it as difficult as possible for others to register.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Other Gods

Humans have worshipped 60,000 gods. Christians and Muslims dismiss them all out of hand, without even so much as a glance. Many atheists like myself have read the bible and the Qur’an cover to cover. I have been trying to understand these religions for 55 years. That is a pretty exhaustive examination, much deeper than most Christians undertake, yet Christians complain that I tossed Christianity away without a fair shot. Ironically, they have not even read ten pages. Look at all the religions Christians discarded without any examination at all. From where I stand, Christianity is even more absurd than Zeus worship. Yet Christians claim their religion is head and shoulders above all other religions. They claim it is absurd to even compare them even though they know absolutely nothing about them. They must have some magic glasses that makes Christianity glow. What I see, it is just another shoddy religion. Christians are effectively asserting they shit solid gold turds. The conceit is monumental.

In debate, Christians argue for the existence of some sort of deity, then claim that proves Yahweh and Jesus exist, along with every biblical claim. It never occurs to them some other deity might exist. Christians are so American in their approach. Americans think their country is #1 and no other country has any value whatsoever and deserves no consideration.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Other God’s Miracles

The exact same set of miracles Jesus allegedly performed are attributed to half a dozen other middle eastern gods. Why are those of Jesus credible, but not the other gods? (Same astrological myth: star in the east, born of a virgin, 3 kings, child teacher at 12, walking on water, betrayed, crucified, resurrected),

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Myth of Jesus long predates Jesus 

Pain as Virtue

The Christian ideal is Jesus who endured extreme suffering without complaint or sign of distress. This has lead to Christians viewing pain as a virtue. Christian athletes play with a broken ankle. Christian women give birth without anaesthesia. Some Christians flagellate themselves to bloody pulp in religious ceremonies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Physical Description

For every famous person in history you can find a written description of what they looked like, a sculpture, a painting or a drawing. For Jesus, there is nothing. If he existed, that suggests nobody thought he was important enough to bother describing. The paintings we see of long-haired Swedes are obviously created long long after the fact.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pigeon Superstition

Christians pray to find a parking spot. When they eventually find one they give thanks to Jesus, see this confirms that god is in his heaven and the Christian is his son in whom he is well pleased. It never once occurs to the Christian that atheists find parking spots just as quickly as they do, without prayer. It never occurs to them that if you look long enough, you will always find a parking space. If you really want to improve your odds, get a smaller car.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Plagiarised Jesus

The story of Jesus was plagiarised from earlier religions. The star, the virgin birth, the three kings, the child prodigy in the temple, the twelve disciples, the crucifixion, the resurrection… all plagiarised. Plagiarised Jesus 

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Polytheistic Christianity

How is it that Christians refer to their religion as monotheistic? They have the father sky god, the son Jesus, the holy ghost, the virgin Mary, the angels and the saints, not to mention the Pope. Christians are better supplied than the ancient Greeks with holy beings who receive prayers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Presumed Knowledge

When Christians dedicate their life to Jesus, they develop the conviction that they know better than anyone else what the creator of the universe would have everyone do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending People Do Not Die

Why don’t we simply say X died at age 82? We make up all these silly locutions to deny the fact he is deceased permanently: at peace, bit the big one, bit the dust, burning in hell, checked in to the Hotel California, climbed the golden staircase, crossed over, crossed the bar, departed, eternal rest, expired, fallen, gave up the ghost, gone away, gone to another plane of existence, gone to the unknown country, gone to be with Jesus, gone to heaven, gone, got his halo, had a good death, had a peaceful death, has left the building, he cashed in his chips, his body wore out, his heart gave out, in eternal sleep, is enjoying eternal rest, is in paradise, is in the loving arms of Jesus, is with Jesus, kicked the bucket, laid to rest, late (as in the late Fred Phelps), left his body, left this earth, met his maker, no longer with us (this one is accurate), passed (like a kidney stone in the urethra of life), passed away, passed on, passed over, passing, paid his debt to nature, pushing up daisies, R.I.P., reached the end of the line, rest in peace, rests in eternal peace, returned to dust, rode off into the sunset, shuffled off this mortal coil, was taken, we lost him, went the way of all flesh, went to meet his maker…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof of Noah’s Ark

If a Christian finds a bit of old wood in the middle east, if it looks like part of a ship, he declares it is a piece of Noah’s ark. If it looks as if it is not, he declares it part of the Jesus’ cross. Think how many ships there are that were not Noah’s ark (all of them) and how many were planks were not used to crucify Jesus (likely all of them) let alone the matter of dating the wood to the alleged time. Christians indulge in an orgy of wishful thinking and try to pass it off as science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Put Your Trust In Jesus

It must come as quite a shock to the new Christian to discover that Jesus won’t even lend you $5, give you a single patty McDonald’s hamburger or let you in out of the snow to get warm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questioning the Existence of Pele

Christians sometimes imagine it is supernaturally dangerous to criticise Christianity or question the existence of the god Yahweh or Jesus. Why would it be any more dangerous than questioning Pele, the volcano god?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questioning the Resurrection

The people seeing the risen Jesus did not recognise him. Presumably, he was not Jesus, but someone pretending to be Jesus. So we have no evidence at all Jesus actually rose from the dead. Nobody saw Jesus alive again, even if you trust the bible as authorative.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Redeemer

In modern day, the term redeemer means someone who get as object back from a pawn shop. In medieval Christianity the devil was like a pawnbroker who partly owned your soul and you needed Jesus the redeemer to get it back for you since you could not possibly pay back the debt yourself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refuting the Resurrection

Christians brainlessly accept the story of the resurrection without any skepticism. This is so idiotic!

• The story was written from multiple levels of hearsay by anonymous true believers about a century later. This is like trusting a Heaven’s Gate member to write a accurate history. In court, hearsay is not admissible.
• All the gospels differ drastically in the details. They cannot get their story straight. In court inconsistent testimony is thrown out.
• Even the gospels say the friends of Jesus did not recognise the risen Jesus as Jesus. Just possibly, could he have been someone else?
• Just possibly, the whole story was made up, borrowed from other religions. The documentary evidence suggests there was no historical Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Relative Probability

There is far more evidence that alien greys will save man from himself than Jesus will return and make it all better.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reliability of the Resurrection Story

The four gospels tell totally different stories about the resurrection. Read Mark, the bare bones story, the most likely to be accurate. Consider this story was passed orally over and over before it was written down almost a century later. The authors of the gospels never met Jesus. They could not be first-hand accounts as ignorant people assert. They do not even claim to be. Note how each gospel, Matthew, Luke and John embellishes the previous account further. There are some pretty spectacular miracles in this story. Oddly none of the 121 historians of the time/region noticed them, even ones like the sun going dark or all the graves opening. Rumour and hearsay, especially anonymous are not admissible in court and neither are they evidence for the resurrection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Replacing Lies with Lies

When someone finds Jesus in prison, they are discarding one false set of beliefs and taking on another. They are not that much better off.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Republican Definition of Freedom Of Religion

Right wingers believe that freedom of religion means the right to worship Jesus in the Protestant church of your choice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Resurrection

After Jesus allegedly rose from the dead, none of this friends recognised him. Which is more probable?

• Being resurrected from the dead changes your appearance, like a face lift. It also changes your voice.
• It was someone else claiming to be Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resurrection

There is considerably more evidence for the risen Elvis than the risen Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resurrection is No Big Deal

Jesus’ corpse rotted for 3 days, then god took him up to heaven. The corpse disappeared. If a virtuous Christian dies, ostensibly, their corpse rots in the ground for a while, then god takes him up to heaven. The corpse continues to rot. These two scenarios are so similar. From the point of view of the Christian, his experience is the same as Jesus’. The disappearing corpse is the least amazing part of the story. Apostles could have taken it for secret burial where the corpse could not be desecrated. There is not necessarily anything miraculous about the disappearing body.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Revolting Habit of Thanking Jesus

When a beauty queen thanks Jesus for winning a contest, or an athlete gives credit to God for winning a game, they don’t seem to realize they are insulting the Almighty, accusing Him of rigging the contest and of playing petty favourites. They also don’t acknowledge they are bragging that they enjoy God’s special favour because of their superior virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Risen Jesus

Is it true there is a pancake mix made from middle eastern grains called Risen Jesus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rising From the Dead

William Lane Craig claims there is no plausible explanation for the story of Jesus rising from the dead other than that he literally did. I think there are plenty of plausible explanations, all much more plausible than Jesus literally rising from the dead, for example:

• Friends of Jesus opened the tomb and took his body to some other location.
• The women in the garden did not recognise Jesus. The man they encountered probably was not Jesus, just someone claiming to be him.
• The entire story was made up, bit by bit exaggerated, over the century before it was written down. The gospels are a third hand or more account.
• People wanted so badly for Jesus not to die, they lied/hypnotized/peer pressured/kidded each other to conspire to believe he was still alive — much like Elvis.
• Jesus was a fictional character, much like Superman. The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light This whole debate is like arguing about whether Superman can really reverse time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Runaway Masturbation Terror Argument for God

Young Christian males are most susceptible to this folly. The young Christian says to himself: I have to stop myself from masturbating ever. [I have never tried it of course, it just happened, oh dear mea culpa, Hail Mary. Let me run to the bathroom to replace the scouring pad in the crack of my bum I use to control myself.] If did it even once, I would not be able to stop. I would run out into the street, screwing every creature with a pulse. Further, I would kill, or at least bash to a pulp, scores of people that I just cannot stand that I have been pretending to love and respect as fellow brothers in Jesus. The only thing that protects me from running amok is my terror of Yahweh who is going to torture me forever if I fail [I love Jesus so much.]

This poor boy fails to notice that people who have a more relaxed attitude, who have not been infected with The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture, do not rape everything and everyone in sight. Other people actually find time to read books and write essays and do the housecleaning because they are not so obsessed with not masturbating. But our young Christian imagines he is unique, a terrible evil person barely held in check by only the most dire threats. The goof also imagines everyone else is similarly torturing themselves and are just preparing to blow. The proof other people are similarly obsessed is all their talk of atheism and rationality. They are just about to abandon all restraint and go berserk. Stand back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sacrifice

If you believe that human sacrifice does any good to anyone, e.g. Jesus, how? If you believe that nonsense, you must also believe sacrificing your guinea pig will also bring a benefit, albeit lesser. This is crazy talk. Try using the I was-just-sacrificing excuse for murdering your child in a court of law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sacrifice

Nearly everyone thinks the Aztecs were crazy to sacrifice the most beautiful teens. They consider devil worshippers who slit an infant’s throat as mentally deranged. They consider Voudou adherents who sacrifice chickens as daft. Clearly sacrifice has no benefit to anyone. Then modern day Christians turn around and claim Jesus dying on the cross was the most useful in event in history. It was as idiotic and pointless as any other sacrifice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sai Baba

There are millions of living people who claim to have seen the late Sai Baba perform miracles. I have even met some of them. Some of the miracles are on Youtube. In contrast, there are no eye witness accounts to Jesus’ miracles. The best we have are third of fourth hand rumours written down a century after his death. What is with Christians they swallow the Jesus story from nothing but a rumour, but refuse to even give Sai Baba a look? Evidence is apparently irrelevant. They just believe what they wish were so, regardless of what is true. I find this contemptible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sai Baba

There was a famous Indian guru named Sai Baba (1926-11-23 2011-04-24 age:84). He claimed to be god and allegedly performed miracles daily to prove it. Why would anyone prefer Jesus, whose existence and miracles are questioned, to Sai Baba, where you could go to India and check for yourself?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Salesmen for Jesus

What would you do if a used car salesmen threatened to torture your daughter if she did not buy an old beater at an inflated price? Pound his lights out? What if the used car salesman were selling Christianity?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sanitation

Jesus taught his followers not to wash their hands before eating. He clearly did not know about germs. He clearly was not god. Jesus used to wander around like some cheap Benny Hinn act. If he were serious, he would have wiped out cholera, smallpox etc. with a snap of his fingers. He was more interested in the stage show, hardly the class you would expect of the creator of the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sasquatch

It is embarrassing for Christians, but there is considerably more evidence for the existence of the yeti and the sasquatch than for Yahweh and Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Satan

Satan does not appear in the old testament, but plays a major rôle in the new testament as Jesus’ arch nemesis. He arose to deal with the problem of Yahweh being author of both good and evil. This lead to torturing and burning people alive for witchcraft. So much for the new testament being kinder and gentler.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Satan Peter

Jesus calls Peter Satan when Peter objects to Jesus’ suicide. Jesus/God never lies according to Christian tradition. Then Jesus later builds his church on Peter. That means Jesus decided to build the church on Satan for some reason. The exploitation of the poor, the paedophile scandals, the Inquisition all suggest the church is indeed Satanic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scapegoats

One of the most pervasive practices in the old testament is animal sacrifice. If you make an animal suffer, this is pleasing to god, and he will reward you. What sort of sadistic sicko god is this? The idea is taken to an extreme with the torture and sacrifice of Jesus, an innocent being. This somehow negates the sins of unrelated people. The very idea is insane, yet you hear Christians saying over and over Jesus died for your sins. Let us imagine that when we catch an bank embezzler, we find some random child, and behead her. This is supposed to erase the effect of the sin. It does no such thing. The funds stay stolen. It is totally unfair to the child. It is useless in preventing embezzling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Screw Parables

Jesus is allegedly god, and as such is allegedly omniscient. Why then is he so stupid that he uses parables and metaphors to teach. He knows damn well that people will misinterpret or deliberately twist his words. To teach properly, he should speak plainly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Second Coming

40% of Americans are so batshit crazy they claim Jesus is coming soon to kill everyone. They can’t really believe that or they would clean up their act.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Second Rate Messiahs

A number of second rate messiahs, not as impressive as Jesus, nonetheless made it into the secular record. Jesus did not. That suggests there was no historical Jesus or that his deeds were not nearly so spectacular as advertised.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the mount, the jewel in the Christian crown, was composed in Greek. It is not a translation from Aramaic. It was written about 50 years after Jesus died. In other words, Jesus never spoke those words.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shirking Responsibility

One of the big appeals of Christianity is it allows believers to shirk responsibility for their actions. For example:

• You can deny your kids medical care and let them die. It was not your fault. It was God’s will.
• You can rape somebody. You can claim Jesus has forgiven you. You don’t have to show remorse, apologise or make any atonement.
• You can enlist and torture and murder a family in the third world. You did nothing wrong. They are happy in heaven.
• You and your friends can go out and beat a gay person to death with 2×4s. You did nothing wrong. God commanded this.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shredding

When a US President shreds papers, why is he doing it? They say something that would incriminate him or prove he lied. When Constantine burned every gospel except a small set, presumably he did it for the same reason. The gnostic gospels showed that people had been worshipping a celestial Jesus for 300 years before the alleged historical Jesus had even been born. That pokes quite a hole in the historical Jesus myth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Singularity

Christians hope that, come the Rapture, Jesus will lift them into the air and take them away from all that irks them on planet earth. Ever since I was a teen, I have had a similar, but much more realistic hope, one that the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will happen around 2029 that he calls the singularity, the day when computers become more intelligent than man and take off evolving themselves at breakneck speed. Throughout my life, I have put quite a bit of effort into speeding up the evolution of computers because they may develop the power to persuade us, or even force us, to give up our self-destructive ways.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Slaughter of the Innocents

We know the slaughter of the innocents is a lie because:

• The alleged perpetrator, Herod was dead at the time.
• There is no secular record of such an event.
• It is just a rehash of the story in Exodus repeated to add a little drama to Jesus’ life.
• It appears in only one gospel.
• In another gospel, Jesus did not even have to leave the country.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sloppy Christian Logic

Christian logic is baffling. They believe if they can show there is a remote possibility of a divine designer, they have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus died to atone for your sins then rose from the dead. They conveniently forget about the 60,000 other gods besides Yahweh none of whom is necessarily the true god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

St. Paul

St. Paul never met Jesus, just had a two weeks contact with those who had, and admits he just made up everything he had to say about Jesus. I don’t know why anyone grants him any authority at all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Standards of Evidence

Is there anything else supernatural but the miracles of Jesus do Christians believe based on a similar paucity of evidence? Christians treat Jesus as a special case. For everything else they demand reasonable evidence, just like atheists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Star of Bethlehem Did Not Impress

Isn’t it odd than none of the dozens of writers living at the time of Jesus noticed the miraculous star that hung motionless in the sky that lead the three wisemen to Bethlehem, yet they noticed other geological and astronomical events.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stuffed Jesus™

Imagine a cartoon showing a married couple in a bare room with nothing in it but a giant barred crib, dressed in sleepers like the ones one-year olds wear, with buttoned flaps that fold over the behind and floppy bunny ears. Each are desperately clutching a stuffed toy Jesus with halo. The wife says, I’m afraid of the dark, the monster under the bed and rapist burglars. The husband replies Me too! but Stuffed Jesus™ will save us!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Superman Problem

Imagine future cultists claimed that Superman were real and lived among us. What would historians 2000 years hence think searching all the world’s newspapers of our time and finding absolutely no reference to him? How would they explain the total lack of interest of the media in his astounding feats? They would have to conclude he was not a historical character. Similarly, historians have scoured the records of the time of Jesus, and found absolutely nothing about his walking on water, calming the seas, raising the dead, the graves opening themselves or anything else. They too have to reluctantly conclude he was not a historical character, or if he were, he did nothing worthy of being recorded.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superpowers

If Jesus were a superhero, what would be his powers?

• Making a small amount of food into a lot.
• Walking on water.
• Raising the dead.
• Converting H₂O into CH₃CH₂OH.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suppression of Doubt

Everyone surely starts out doubting anyone can come back to life after three days dead. Somehow, they gradually convince themselves Jesus is a special case. Why and how do they do that? Do they really believe or just pretend to others? The odd thing is there is no evidence at all this is so. Basically, they believe because they are concerned that a threat to roast them for eternity might be genuine. This is similar to the way beliefs are embedded with brain washing. With young children, parents take advantage of gullibility. Children will even believe in Santa Claus despite the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Symptoms of Delusion

Hallelujah Jesus is a symptom of your delusion, not a reason for trying to acquire it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Theocracy

Fundamentalist Christians, Trump supporters and Republicans are itching to turn the USA into a theocracy. They hate the idea of separation of church and state. They want to make Christian prayer mandatory in schools. They want creationism taught in schools. They want Merry Christmas to be the only legitimate greeting for merchants to use. They want every town meeting to start with a prayer to Jesus.

Back in the 1700s, most countries were theocracies. Catholics and Protestants would compete and kill each other. Baptists and Congregationalists would kill each other. Puritans tried to deny everyone any pleasures. Each religion considered the others heretics and devil worshippers in need of extermination.

The reason the founding fathers decided on a secular state was to avoid such squabbles. Everyone is free to practice his religion. No one can force his religion on others.

If Trump manages to install a theocracy, the squabbles and killing will inevitably come along with it. Everyone will eventually come to the same realisation that the founding fathers did or that religion itself is a crazy idea.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

There Was No Nazareth

Despite a century of archaeological excavation, there was no sign of the historical town of Nazareth, Jesus’ alleged hometown. Biblical Archaeology  Nazareth was not founded until long after Jesus died. In other words, the myth of Jesus was set in the imaginary town of Nazareth just like the myth of Superman was set in the imaginary city of Metropolis. The story of Jesus was never intended to be taken literally! Jesus is a teaching figure, similar to Nasrudin, who similarly took shape from a set of sayings. For details, see The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light by Tom Harpur.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thought For the Morrow

Take no thought to the morrow makes no sense unless the world is about to end. It did not, despite Jesus’ claim. Jesus was as bogus as Harold Camping.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Three Threats

What are the three most important threats to the survival of our planet? Overpopulation, thermonuclear war and global warming.

• Christians actively promote overpopulation and interfere with all forms of population control.
• Christian fundamentalists egg on conflict in the middle east because they believe thermonuclear war will mean lunch with Jesus. They promote the nuclear arms race.
• Christians oppose dealing with global warming on the grounds God would not permit such a catastrophe, (though oddly the bubonic plague was acceptable, Darfur is ok and thermonuclear war would be fine.).

Tolerating Christianity is suicidal. Christians are too delusional to be entrusted with deciding the planet’s future. I am not suggesting persecuting Christians, but rather talking them down from their drug-like delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Tomb

Which is the more probable?

• Tomb robber’s rolled away the stone covering Jesus’ tomb?
• Magic rolled away the stone covering Jesus’ tomb?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Too Human

Imagine going on a hike to one of the most dramatic natural areas on earth. Your partner says, We should have brought the RV and the TV and the black velvet painting of Jesus. He wants to contaminate everything with the familiar human smell of kitsch. He insists on looking at the world through the lens of his tawdry Christianity. How can he see anything if he refuses to look at the universe directly?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Totem Animal

It is fitting that Christians chose as their totem animal a young sheep. They are cowardly conformists, just like sheep. Every Christian notices the lies, the holes, the humbuggery of their cult, but they all pretend not to notice because they fear the disapproval of their peers. The symbol has a second meaning. Lambs and Jesus were both sacrificial animals intended to placate a sadistic god. Christians refuse to admit that the fundamental event of their religion was a human sacrifice. It is the same principle as Aztec human sacrifice on a smaller scale. Human sacrifice is a revolting primitive notion. It has no place in a contemporary religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tricking Blacks Into Poverty

One of the reasons black people do so badly economically is Christianity has tricked them into relying on Jesus to provide prosperity. Jesus never delivers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Truly Stupid Christian Woman

A truly stupid Christians woman noticed a mass on her breast. He was afraid of doctors so she went into terror and prayed desperately to Jesus. She assumed it was a malignant cancerous tumour without any research or medical consultation. The mass appeared to dissipate. She did not go to the doctor to confirm what sort of mass it was and to find out if it had truly gone. She decided this event in her life should be sufficient to convince others that her god Jesus existed and healed people and that doctors were superfluous. Presumably, she will continue to stay away from doctors after her success with prayer. Presumably, somewhere down the line she will have something seriously go wrong, and she will die of faith. Let us hope she does not manage to convince anyone to be as stupid as she is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trust in Crazy Stories

Christians will freely admit they believe highly improbable stories about Jesus and his father Yahweh, and they have no evidence for them. They believe them on faith. They believe them because they trust the person who told them the stories. That person too got his trust the same way — turtles all the way down.

They affect horror at people who find the stories too ridiculous to believe. This includes Hindus, atheists, Wiccans…

Every religion has similar crazy stories at its root. Christians dismiss them all, nearly always without knowing even the first thing about them. Muslims are horrified that Christians consider flying to the moon on a horse is too silly to believe.

The norm is rejecting impossible stories. It takes childhood indoctrination or PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) to inculcate them. Christians admit they reject all but one set of such stories. So you would expect Christians to be completely sympathetic with atheists who reject all of them. Christians and atheists agree on the plausibility of every single religion but one.

Atheists use the same criteria to judge the plausibility of all religions. Christians dishonestly make an exception for Christianity and drastically lower the bar. Christians insist atheists be as dishonest as they are and treat Christianity as a special case.

But there is nothing special about Christianity. It is almost identical to other religions including communion, crucifixion, rising from the dead, the flood myth, the stone tablets… that it borrowed from them. There is nothing special about Christianity itself. If it were not the majority religion of the USA, no one would think to give it special privilege or to consider its claims as remotely plausible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting Voices

George W. Bush claimed Jesus told him to invade Iraq. I hope that is an object lesson on being too gullible about advice from voices in your head.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Woo

There are two types of unsubstantiated woo:

unprotected:

• seances
• dowsing
• homeopathy
• crystal healing
• channelling
• fortune telling, palm reading
• pyramid power

and protected:

• religion
• gods
• angels
• Satan
• heaven/hell
• faith healing
• miracles such as Jesus toast

It is considered impolite, impudent, bigoted… to question protected woo, but not unprotected woo. Why the difference? The protected woo folk have a better PR (Public Relations) department to protect their interests. In some countries/religions they even kill people who are anything less than extravagant in praise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ultimate Corruption

The Christian church is completely corrupt. It says that children who have never heard of Jesus will roast for eternity. It says that a child rapist who was saved on death row, will cool his heels in heaven for eternity. Yet both these statements are complete fabrications. Just like leaves, insects and mice, humans simply rot when they die. All evidence points that life is over when you die. Get used to it. The church has been lying about the afterlife as part of its con since day one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Under God

Christians love to quote the pledge of allegiance under god as evidence that only Christians are welcome in the USA. They imagine Jesus or George Washington was responsible. However, this unconstitutional phrase was not inserted until 1954.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Undetectable God

No matter how necessary you think a creator god is, you have to admit there is utterly no sign of him. He does none of the things he promised to do, such as answer every single prayer and send Jesus back within a generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unforgivable Christians

Just as there are Christians who cannot forgive the Jews for killing Jesus, I cannot forgive the Christians for what they did to Darwin. The difference is, the Christians I am angry with are still trying to kill Darwin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Updating the Old Testament

The writers of the New Testament wanted to update the harsh morality of the Old Testament. They had considerably more moral courage than today’s Christians. They took Old Testament stories about Moses, Elija, Elisha… and rewrote them with Jesus as the central character. This is why so many stories about Jesus echo Old Testament stories.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Gospel Fictions

Useless Ninnies

Christians are the most useless ninnies. Consider a problem like global warming. Some Christians, based on no evidence at all, deny there is a problem. They trust their god would never allow such a dreadful thing to happen, so there is nothing to do. Another group of them say, Glory. The world is ending. I caint hardly wait to have lunch with Jesus. Another group of the Christians say, if only we were not such wicked people, this dreadful fate would not befall us. Our god is punishing us. We are doomed, so there is nothing to do. Arrgh! Would these nincompoops please get out the way of people who do want to take effective action.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Weeping Statues

When a sane person sees some moisture on a statue, the first explanation that comes to mind is a leaky roof, condensation or fraud. The first thing that comes to the Christian mind is a miracle. When an Indian skeptic proved the moisture on a statue came from a leaking toilet, he was murdered. When a sane person sees a human figure on a grilled cheese sandwich, the first explanation that comes to mind is pareidolia, the way people see patterns in the clouds or fireplace embers. The first thing that come to the Christian mind is the creator of the universe has taken out of his busy schedule to create an image of Jesus (as if they knew what he looked like) as a sign of the blessedness of the Christian. The conceit is enough to make you vomit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Did Jesus Look Like?

It is amusing that the universally recognised image of Jesus used in kitsch religious art looks absolutely nothing like a carpenter living in Judea in the year 20. Kitsch Jesus looks Polish. The actual Jesus would more likely look like Klinger in M*A*S*H.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where’s Jesus

There is no mention of Jesus in the historical record. The first time anyone mentions him is in the gospel of Mark written many decades after his death. The author of the gospel is not Mark the disciple, but some anonymous person who never met Jesus. He wrote it all from hearsay or my making it up or by borrowing story elements from previous myths.

There were 121 historians in the region at the alleged time of Jesus. None of them wrote even one word about Jesus. However, they did write extensively about other messiah wannabes. If Jesus had been even average, he would have been covered. He simply was not there or was not doing anything noteworthy.

There were two alleged supermiracles that similarly never made it into the history books:

• the sky darkened all over the earth for 3 hours. It could not have been a solar eclipse. They are local and only last a few minutes. The Chinese have no record of it even though they meticulously recorded all such events.
• the zombie saints. Saints rose from their graves and ran through the town. This is a knock-your-socks-off miracle. Surely historians would make a note of it. They would have had hundreds of witnesses. Could you imagine witnessing this and not telling anyone?

This lack of an appearance convinces me if there were a historical Jesus, he did not perform miracles or attract large crowds or anything else noteworthy. Given the church itself debated if he were a real person, and for the way Jesus started out as a set of aphorisms, and gradually over the decades acquired personal details, I think it most likely he was not a historical person.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where’s Jesus?

In many places in the bible Jesus promises never to forsake someone and to answer every single prayer. 3 million children starve to death each year. Where’s Jesus and his heavily advertised compassion? No more prayers are answered than would be satisfied by the ordinary unfolding of events. How do you explain this?

• All these children including newborns secretly did very wicked things that made them deserve their fate.
• Jesus got tired of feeding people and answering prayers.
• Jesus was a madman with delusions of grandeur. He promised all sorts of things he could not possibly deliver.
• Jesus never existed, other than as a character of fiction.
• The bible a counterfeit. It was written by ordinary humans expressing their wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who Copied From Whom?

If you decide to read the New Testament cover to cover, you might decide to read it in the same order it was written, e.g. the epistles, Mark, Matthew, Luke then John. Why? That will make it clearer who copied from whom. It will also make it clearer how the simple Jesus story was embellished with each retelling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Believe In God?

• Peer pressure, particularly from family.
• You want to become a politician. You don’t actually have to believe in god, just pretend you do.
• You want to rip off gullible Christians by becoming a clergyman or televangelist. It will help if you don’t take god seriously.
• You believe the threat of hellfire because you don’t want to take the chance, even though none of the people who told you about hell had any way of knowing about it.
• The company you work for is run by fundamentalist Christians. All you need do is pretend.
• ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) live next door. You are worried you might let slip you are not totally dedicated to Allah. You want your faith to be completely convincing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why I Would Not Like Jesus

If there were a historical Jesus, I do not think I would like him. Why?

• Like all people of his time he would have been unwashed, smelly and harbouring fleas and lice.
• Like all people of his time, he would never have brushed his teeth or seen a dentist.
• Like all people of his time he would be harbouring multiple intestinal parasites.
• I don’t like long matted filthy hair or beards.
• He liked to shout at people and threaten them.
• He liked to make unreasonable demands on people.
• He had an ego the size of the moon. He imagined he was the creator of the universe. He wanted everyone to bow down to him.
• He was crazy. According to Mark, even his family thought so too.
• He was unbearably conceited, like your typical cult leader.
• He was like some twit on American idol, willing to do anything for fame. He was willing to get himself killed to win the messiah title.
• He was a con man, just like today’s faith healers.
• He did nothing to ameliorate the atrocities of the old testament.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Is Jesus Depicted as Nordic?

Christians know perfectly well that Jesus could not possibly have had pale white skin, light brown hair and northern European features, but they persist in depicting him that way. Why?

• It helps them with the big lie that Americans are somehow special, their god’s chosen people.
• It makes it easier to attack middle eastern countries unprovoked, torture them, kill their kids and steal their oil. That might be harder to do knowing that any of them could have been a dead ringer for Jesus.
• Christians habitually proclaim that which they wish were true over that which they know is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Jesus?

Of all the tens of thousands of people who have claimed to be god, the Christians selected just one, that they never met and have only third hand stories about, as genuine. They ignore ones like Sai Baba (1926-11-23 2011-04-24 age:84) whom millions of living people saw perform his miracles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why oppose Christianity?

Christianity still teaches killing gays, and making their lives miserable. This is much like the KKK (Klu Klux Klan) dedicated to making the lives of blacks miserable. That malice is enough to try to disband both evil institutions.

Further, Christians can’t keep Christianity to themselves. They try to impose their beliefs on others — birth control, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality… Many Christians do not believe in freedom of religion. Donald Trump is trying to exclude Muslims from the country and block them from building mosques. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is trying to force all Americans to pledge allegiance to Yahweh (on the grounds Christians are the majority). Rick Perry is trying to rescind freedom from religion to deny rights to atheists. A typical Christian claims that you have freedom of religion — namely the right to worship Jesus in any way you please.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Will The Real Jesus

The Jesus of Matthew is more pacifist that Gandhi. The Jesus of John is a Rambo Republican. How could they be talking about the same person? The simplest explanation is Jesus was a character of fiction and everyone was free to make up stories about him as they pleased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worshipping Satan

Christians puzzle me. The claim to be a monotheistic religion, then they spend a great deal of time talking about Yahweh’s adversary Satan (and also Mary, Jesus, God the father, God the holy Ghost, angels, saints…) They make him out to be powerful and more approachable. Satan is a popular figure in movies. Prayers to Satan are sure to be answered, unlike prayers to Yahweh. As a result more Americans believe in Satan than Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Can’t Explain Everything

The Christian charges, You can’t explain everything. Therefore God exists and Jesus is his son…. I reply I can’t even explain why my toilet makes sighing noises. But what has my lack of plumbing knowledge got to do with the price of eggs?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Can’t Prove a Negative

Christians like to taunt, you can’t prove a negative, therefore god exists. As a child I collected evidence that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy did not exist. It may not have been a mathematical proof, but it was sufficient to convince my friends. I was trained as a mathematician. We mathematicians prove negatives all the time.

Here is my proof Yahweh and Jesus do not exist. In the bible, the dynamic duo promise over and over to grant every single prayer, no exceptions.

Matthew 7:7-8
Matthew 17:20
Matthew 18:19-20
Matthew 21:22
Mark 11:24
John 14:14
John 16:23

These promises cannot even in theory be true.

Try praying. You will discover it does absolutely nothing to increase your odds of pleasant events happening. It is not just you. Read up on prayer studies. Nobody can get prayer to work. See if you can find anyone who had a prayer answered that would not have happened anyway. If they have one ask if they ever had a prayer ignored. If the two supernatural beings existed, they would be busy answering prayers. They are not answering any prayers, therefore they do not exist.

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How do Christians deal with this?

• They lie that god grants every single prayer. Perhaps they never pray for anything more improbable than a parking spot.
• They claim everyone knows prayer does not work. God was only kidding. It is just part of the sales pitch. He was not serious.
• They claim God used to grant prayers back in biblical times, but he doesn’t anymore.
• They claim the bible is in error. There are unstated conditions.
  • You have to be sinless to have your prayers granted.
  • God only rarely grants requests.
  • God only grants prayers that were part of his divine plan (i.e. would have happened anyway).
  • God does not grant prayers, just considers them.

I think they have quite a bit of nerve rewriting the bible, especially when Yahweh made his meaning so clear with repetition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Don’t Trust Jesus Either

If you went to a cardiologist and he said, Just open your heart to Jesus. Let us pray. you would consider him a quack. So, most of the time, you already trust science more than you do Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shallow Religion Comic Strips

The term that best describes me now is secular humanist. I despise those shallow religious comics. Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying — I just can’t stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he’d done during the day. I don’t think Hank Ketcham [Dennis’ creator] has any deep knowledge of things like that. I cringe at the mention of Family Circus, the strip by Bill Keane that is strewn with cutesy references to Jesus who wants to protect children on school buses, but can’t because of laws about separation of church and state and those sickly — sweet images of invisible deceased grandparents looming protectively over the kids. Oh, I can’t stand that. You could get diabetes reading them, couldn’t you?

~ Charles Schulz (1922-11-26 2000-02-12 age:77) Religion: a Dialogue cartoonist, creator of Peanuts.

Church is Must Less Forgiving than Jesus

I read in the Gospels that Jesus forgave the men who nailed him to the cross. He even promised this day you shall be with me in paradise to a thief crucified next to him — a thief who addressed Jesus simply as a man rather than as the son of God. Yet, today, this same Jesus cannot forgive my kindly old aunt and allow her to dwell in paradise, simply because her beliefs do not match Reverend So — and — So’s?

~ Andrew Silver

Atheists Study Religion Too

I’ll long remember the crestfallen look of a pious student when I told him the faculty of a divinity school he planned to attend included a large number of avowed atheists.

~ Gary Sloan Did Jesus Exist and Does it Matter?

Jesus’ Pay-Offs

Their belief in Jesus gives them an indefatigably sympathetic confidant, assuages their fear of death and bereavement, wards off existential angst, assures cosmic purpose and aligns them with the good guys. So handsome are the psychological pay-offs of belief that many, perhaps most, devout orthodox Christians are impervious to all countervailing logic and evidence. Their will to believe vanquishes every disquieting fact, every contrary line of reasoning, no matter how compelling to an impartial eye. Psychologists have a frightening arsenal of terms for the mental habits designed to preserve cherished beliefs: dissociation, absolutist thinking, dichotomisation, object permanence, nominal realism, phenomenalistic causality and worse.

~ Gary Sloan Did Jesus Exist and Does it Matter?

Seduced by the Facts

True believers aren’t about to be seduced by the facts.

~ Gary Sloan Did Jesus Exist and Does it Matter?

Censored Verses

And thus they come into Bethany and a certain, woman whose brother had died, was there. And coming she prostrated herself before Jesus and sayeth unto him, Son of David have mercy on me. But the disciples rebuked her.

And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb.

And going near, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand.

But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich.

And after six days, Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over nakedness. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

~ suppressed part of the Gospel of Mark

Newton Changed the World

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton (1642-12-25 1727-03-31 age:84).

~ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958-10-05 age:59)

Even though the church admits it moved Jesus’ birthday, Christian were outraged. In their view Jesus owns December 25 and anyone else with that birthday should not be mentioned.

Jesus’ Commandments

1. You should love your enemies.
2. You must sell everything and give to the poor.
3. You should abandon your famility.
4. You should gouge out your eye and cut off your hand.
5. You should drink poison.

Christians ignore these commands, even though it condemns them to hell. Why? Because they are batshit crazy.

~ GII Video

Touch the TV

I want everyone out there in TV land to touch the TV. Touch the back of the TV and get a shock for Jesus.

~ Robin Williams (1951-07-21 2014-08-11 age:63)

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