All that the ridiculous claims Jesus makes for his God convince me of is that Jesus himself was, at best, deluded, and at worst, an utter fraud – a traveling salesman who promised the Earth and delivered absolutely nothing. His unfulfilled, empty promises are evidence enough that his God, like all the others, does not exist.
Heh — Gerencser is making a clever argument here and it ought to be dispositive: Jesus didn’t keep his promises, so why should he be taken seriously? Definitely, those verses and the citations are going to be added to my everyday-carry.
I always feel squeamish when I encounter the word “atheist” because the Evangelical Right’s insistence upon making religion central to our public conversation, though we are not supposed to criticize religion, has caused it to be used so many different ways; I’m never certain what people mean when they use it, and I’m never certain what people hear when it is used.
As coined by Thomas Huxley, “atheist” is a neologism formed from a used as a negative; an atheist is a non-theist, just as an amoral person is non-moral. On this definition, Hindus and Buddhists and Deists and Zoroastrians are atheists, though Hindus and Zoroastrians and Deists believe in a god (possibly many), and many Buddhists do also. An atheist isn’t necessarily somebody who believes in no god — though that is another common usage of the word, and the one I grew up with.
This confusion makes it worthwhile to occasionally enumerate the things one believes.
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I don’t know whether there are any supernatural beings. On that ground, I have always identified as an agnostic.
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I do know that nobody has ever adduced a scintilla of objective evidence in favor of thinking so that would stand-up in a half-decent high school science class and, after uncountable millennia of trying, I think the likelihood that anybody will produce evidence is vanishingly small.
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I do know that the Christian narrative is untrue; it is so full of blinking-neon contradictions and wild improbabilities that I don’t believe a properly functioning mind can reach any other conclusion. A mind that ridicules the idea of Muhammad galloping off to Heaven on a white horse, but doesn’t doubt that Jesus walked on water, is a dysfunctional mind and cannot be trusted.
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The Bible is a wholly human creation comprising pornography, journalism, spiritual reflections, and ordinary human finagling and politicking. It was not authored by, or inspired by, a supernatural being. Somebody who does believe that the Bible was inspired or authored by the same being that spun tens of billions of galaxies into orbit, each comprised of tens of billions of stars with their own orbit, ought to wonder why that being did such a rotten job of writing the instruction manual.
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If Abraham’s god is real, then he is a cruel sociopath and to worship him, to hope to spend eternity with him, is to disgrace oneself. There is no honorable course but resistance.