Bill Muehlenberg, Telling Lies for Atheism
Melanie Phillips, The Truth Delusion of Richard Dawkins
The relevant comment is at Bill Muehlenberg, Dawkins, Deism and Jesus
Thus says the Lord: “I will bring evil upon you out of your own house. I will take your wives [plural] while you live to see it, and will give them to your neighbor. He shall lie with your wives in broad daylight. You have done this deed in secret, but I will bring it about in the presence of all Israel, and with the sun looking down.”
Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan answered David: “The Lord on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die. But since you have utterly spurned the Lord by this deed, the child born to you must surely die.” [The child dies seven days later.]
This has got to be one of the sickest quotes of the Bible. God himself brings the completely innocent rape victims to the rapist. What kind of pathetic loser would do something so evil? And then he kills a child! This is sick, really sick!
Polygamy: present.
Rape: absent.
Baby Killing: the author cannot seem to decide if it is “Baby Killing” such as in the tile or “The child dies” as in the brackets (or is it that the child dies from being killed?)
God's “Forgiveness”: present (by the way, note that to the mind of the atheist this is a bad thing).
When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your hand, so that you take captives, if you see a comely woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as wife, you may take her home to your house.
But before she may live there, she must shave her head and pare her nails and lay aside her captive's garb. After she has mourned her father and mother for a full month, you may have relations with her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife.
However, if later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; but you shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion.
They must be dividing the spoils they took: there must be a damsel or two for each man, Spoils of dyed cloth as Sisera's spoil, an ornate shawl or two for me in the spoil.
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.
But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.
If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.
“she shall not go out as the menservants do” (v. 7).
If her “master” agreed to marry her but does not then he had to “let her be redeemed” and could not “sell her to a strange nation” because “he has dealt deceitfully with her” (v. 8, consider that carefully: he was not allowed to deceive her).
If she was to marry the son then the “master” was to treat her as his own daughters (v. 9).
If the “master” married her and then practiced polygamy she was not to enjoy any less goods (food, clothing, etc.) than before, she was to remain well cared for (v. 10).
Finally, if the “master” did not marry her, and therefore did not care for her as a wife, or if his son did not marry her, and therefore was not cared for as a wife and daughter, or if she became part of a polygamous marriage and was not cared for properly, she was free to leave the household (v. 11).
Lo, a day shall come for the Lord when the spoils shall be divided in your midst. And I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for battle: the city shall be taken, houses plundered, women ravished; half of the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be removed from the city.
1) Something that God foreordains on the one hand.
2) The actions that people choose on the other—even within the foreordained event, lest we forget free will.
3) And God’s overall reaction—His original purpose for foreordaining the action—on still another hand.
Then the LORD will go forth.
And fight against those nations,
as He fights in the day of battle.
Virtually lose the ability to simply read a text and understand what it is stating.
Lose the basic cognitive abilities involved in reasoning and discerning.
Demonstrated an utter lack of honest scholarly skepticism.
Make it clear that all they can see is hatred or that hatred is like goggles on their eyes which taint everything they see.
And that by imagining rape where rape is not even hinted at they present the stuff of which Freudian dissertations are made.
If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.
KJV, “a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her.”
NKJV, “a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her.”
ESV, “a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her.”
NASB, “a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her.”
RSV, “a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her.”
ASV, “a virgin, that is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her.”
HNV, “a virgin, who is not pledged to be married, and lay hold on her, and lie with her.”
Young’s, “a virgin who is not betrothed, and hath caught her, and lain with her.”
Darby’s, “a virgin, who is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her.”
Webster’s, “a virgin, who is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her.”
RVR, “una joven virgen que no fuere desposada, y la tomare y se acostare con ella.”
If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.
It is clear that God doesn't give a damn about the rape victim. He is only concerned about the violation of another mans [sic] "property".
Suppose a man meets a young woman, a virgin who is engaged to be married, and he has sexual intercourse with her. If this happens within a town…
But if the man meets the engaged woman out in the country, and he rapes her, then only the man should die.
Do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no crime worthy of death. This case is similar to that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor.
Since the man raped her out in the country, it must be assumed that she screamed, but there was no one to rescue her.
If, however, it is in the open fields that a man comes upon such a betrothed maiden, seizes her and has relations with her, the man alone shall die.
You shall do nothing to the maiden, since she is not guilty of a capital offense. This case is like that of a man who rises up against his neighbor and murders him:
it was in the open fields that he came upon her, and though the betrothed maiden may have cried out for help, there was no one to come to her aid.
If a man comes upon a maiden that is not betrothed, takes her and has relations with her, and their deed is discovered, the man who had relations with her shall pay the girl's father fifty silver shekels and take her as his wife, because he has deflowered her. Moreover, he may not divorce her as long as he lives.
“I believe that a man called Jesus did walk the earth at one time but I don't think he was the superhero that the Bible makes him out to be…I think Jesus was just an ordinary person, like me and you.”
“it would help if, just occasionally, he was a tad less humourless and relentless in his attacks on all that is even vaguely religious.”
Dawkins and Kay
“I believe that, given proper encouragement to think, and given the best information available, people will courageously cast aside celestial comfort blankets and lead intellectually fulfilled, emotionally liberated lives”[1] (italics in original).
“I think there is a poetic consolation to be found in science, and I tried to give expression to it.”[2]
you and I probably do have…feelings that may very well be akin to a kind of mystical…I experience, and I expect you experience, internal feelings which sound pretty much like um, what mystics feel, and they call it God. If - and I’ve been called a very religious person for that reason - if I am called a religious person, then my retort to that is, “Well, you're playing with words.”, because what the vast majority of people mean by religious is something utterly different from this sort of transcendent, mystical experience […] The transcendent sense…the transcendent, mystic sense, that people who are both religious and non-religious in my usage of the term, is something very very different. In that sense, I probably am a religious person. You probably are a religious person…the sense of wonder that one gets as a scientist contemplating the cosmos, or contemplating mitochondria is actually much grander than anything that you will get by contemplating the traditional objects of religious mysticism.[3]
…science does have some of religion’s virtues…All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe — almost worship — this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics…
Science can offer a vision of life and the universe which, as I’ve already remarked, for humbling poetic inspiration far outclasses any of the mutually contradictory faiths and disappointingly recent traditions of the world’s religions.
The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as of a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
I find that a chilling, spine-tingling, exciting, perspective-raising, consciousness-raising experience. It's said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.[4]
far more enlightening and transcendent, spiritual, than anything I had experienced in seven years of being a born again Christian.[5]
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion…This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today…evolution as a kind of metaphysics rather than a straight science.[6]
“Einsteinian religion is a kind of spirituality which is nonsupernatural…And that doesn’t mean that it’s somehow less than supernatural religion. Quite the contrary….It is something bigger, something grander, something that I believe any scientist can subscribe to, including those scientists whom I would call atheists…What I can’t understand is why we are expected to show respect for good scientists, even great scientists, who at the same time believe in a god who does things like listen to our prayers, forgive our sins, perform cheap miracles…I suppose my hope would be that science—the best kind of science, the sort of science which approaches the best sort of religion, the Einsteinian spirituality that I was talking about—is so inspiring, so exciting that it should be sellable to everybody…
We have something far better to offer…Why are we freethinking secular scientists not getting into that same marketplace…and selling what we’ve got to sell? Because it’s a far better product, and all we’ve got to do is hone our salesmanship to the level that they are already doing it. [italics in original]
…men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because the thing which may be known of God is clearly revealed within them, for God revealed it to them. For the unseen things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being realized by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, for them to be without excuse. Because, knowing God, they did not glorify Him as God, neither were thankful. But they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man…
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness…For they changed the truth of God into a lie…they did not think fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind (Romans 1:18b-28).
How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something, like in atheism spirituality, because he finds freedom, liberation, refreshment, joy, consol, transcendence, ecstasy, spine-shivering, spine-tingling, breath-catching, awe inspiration, chill, excitement or sciensuality in it. What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not that in which we freedom, liberation, refreshment, joy or consolation”?
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest.
If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children.
The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you.
All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.
Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?[7]
They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men…Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children and seized their cattle and flocks and all their wealth as plunder…they brought them all to Moses…[who said] the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.
As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you.
whoever has killed any person, and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. Purify every garment, everything made of leather, everything woven of goat’s hair, and everything made of wood (Numbers 31:19-20).
So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead…"This is what you are to do," they said. "Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin." Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.
The Israelite assembly sent a peace delegation to the little remnant of Benjamin who were living at the rock of Rimmon. Then the men of Benjamin returned to their homes, and the four hundred women of Jabesh-gilead who were spared were given to them as wives. But there were not enough women for all of them…
They told the men of Benjamin who still needed wives, "Go and hide in the vineyards. When the women of Shiloh come out for their dances, rush out from the vineyards, and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife! And when their fathers and brothers come to us in protest, we will tell them, 'Please be understanding. Let them have your daughters, for we didn't find enough wives for them when we destroyed Jabesh-gilead. And you are not guilty of breaking the vow since you did not give your daughters in marriage to them.'" So the men of Benjamin did as they were told. They kidnapped the women who took part in the celebration and carried them off to the land of their own inheritance.
Obviously these women were repeatedly raped. These sick bastards killed and raped an entire town and then wanted more virgins, so they hid beside the road to kidnap and rape some more. How can anyone see this as anything but evil?
1) The virgin’s relatives were “murdered.”
2) They were taken by those who “murdered” their relatives.
3) Thus, even if they marry those who “murdered” their relatives they are essentially being raped (I am further imagining that marriage is something to which the virgins would be forced—another unfounded assertion).
1) What the text means is not to be determined by your, mine or the author of evilbible.com’s ability to imagine what it means.
2) What the text means is not to be determined in the same way that we determine the meaning of any text—context: historical, cultural, grammatical, immediate, greater, etc. Basic hermeneutics: exegesis versus eisegesis / isogesis, etc.
3) Such determining knowledge would have alerted the author of evilbible.com of the actual content of the Bible. However, this would not have made for an exciting website name such as “Evil Bible” or an enticing page entitled “Rape in the Bible.” Moreover, this would not make for a convenient one stop shop for, sadly, typical pseudo-skeptical atheists who consider scholarship to be cutting and pasting hyperlinks.
1) The text said nothing of rape.
2) The text did not even imply rape because…
3) There were detailed regulations as to how to deal with such a situation.
if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.
whoever has killed any person, and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. Purify every garment, everything made of leather, everything woven of goat’s hair, and everything made of wood (Numbers 31:19-20).
Matt from Vox Veritatis has posted The Impossibility of God, Part I: Prolegomena
Rhology from Rhoblogy has posted The EvilBible.com Project, Part 1 - Murder in the Bible
Rape is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Yet few people know that the Bible often condones and even approves of rape. How anyone can get their moral guidance from a book that allows rape escapes me…
Note that in many places in the Bible there are references to "taking a wife". Don't be fooled into thinking that these were voluntary marriages. This first quote clearly shows that murder and force were used to "take" these wives.
I cannot persuade myself that a benevolent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (p. 1),Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit (p. 138),Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
in addition to their usefulness in provoking disquieting notions concerning natural order and the nature of “individuality,” parasitic wasps may have important economic consequences. Macrocentrus grandii is a polyembryonic wasp that parasitizes the European corn borer. The ability of an insect to form from a holoblastically cleaving embryo should also encourage us to appreciate some of the plasticity of nature and discourage us from making sweeping generalizations about an entire subphylum of organisms.[2]
He wrote this in the context of considering that “discussions of animal development are often bottlenecked through particular organisms.”
Let us imagine that Charles Darwin decided that due to such bio-functions of bio-organisms God does not exist.[3] What has he accomplished? Ichneumonidae is still about its business and it does not have to worry about theology. Nor does it have to worry about morality anymore.
What Charles Darwin would have accomplished is to turn something which according to a very particular and peculiar theology questioned God’s character into a mere amoral bio-function. Do away with God and all, each and every, behavior is a mere bio-function which we then take upon ourselves to prefer to call “good” or “bad.”
Thus, an consistent Atheist’s Chaplain would merely consider the actions of Ichneumonidae and merely state, “What a fascinating bio-organic function” not fretting about esthetic-morality.
While a Devil’s Chaplain would say, “Delightful!”
And an Unfallen Angel’s Chaplain would say, “we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs…eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption.”
Ultimately, Charles Darwin accomplished a herculean task; he solved the “problem of evil,” at least in a particular and peculiar way.
If God exists: Ichneumonidae’s actions are evil and thus, evil exists.
Yet, if God does not exist: Ichneumonidae’s actions are a merely amoral bio-function, evil does not exist.
Thus, the “problem of evil” is, in this manner, solved by merely asking, “What evil?”
Ultimately, the Devil’s Chaplain was all too successful in preaching his message. His brimstone and fire preaching against God, against God’s indifference to the cruelty of His own creation, succeeded in causing the death of God and with God went the Devil. With the devil being relegated to the realm of mythology (the Devil’s most brilliantly successful feat) the devil’s chaplain found himself out of a job.
[1] From Charles Darwin’s letter to Joseph D. Hooker – July 13, 1856
[2] Scott F. Gilbert, DevBio – A Companion to Developmental Biology (8th ed.), chapter: Polyembryony: The Parasitic Wasps
[3] Alfred Russell Wallace, co-conceiver with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, wrote:
“‘I fully accept Mr. Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily structure with that of the higher mammalian, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes,’ he conceded. However, man’s intellectual powers and moral sense, among other things, he said, ‘could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone, and…, therefore, some other influence, law, or agency is required to account for them.’ Darwin was naturally upset by what Wallace called ‘my little heresy,’ and he wrote to Wallace in 1869 lamenting, ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’”
[Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 310]
Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system.
For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).
Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist “to make nice music”, while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. “It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were ‘for’ a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion,” says Kelemen.”
adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. [Jesse] Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. “They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it,” Bering says. The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, [University of Michigan in Ann Arbor anthropologist Scott] Atran says.
So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.
Olivera Petrovich believes that “children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: ‘They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience.’” Thus, the ultimate experiment is conceived of as posing the question, “Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs?” Although, this will not be carried out in the foreseeable future at least, not as long as those meddlesome funda-thumpin'-evang-YECists keep squelching the establishment of “science” and prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Interestingly, one could take all of the various experiments, studies and opinions stated in the article and simply say, “Oh, so that’s how God directed supernatural selection so as to give us the ability to recognize His existence” or “Of course, we are hard-wired, by our Creator, to conceptualize His existence.”
[1] Michael Brooks, “Born believers: How your brain creates God,” 04 February 2009
Christians tend to be the most generous group of donors. An examination of the three dominant subgroups within the Christian community showed that evangelicals, the 7% of the population who are most committed to the Christian faith, donated a mean of $4260 to all non-profit entities in 2007.
Non-evangelical born again Christians, who represent another 37% of the public, donated a mean of $1581. The other 42% of the Christian population, who are aligned with a Christian church but are not born again, donated a mean of $865. Overall, the three segments of the Christian community averaged donations of $1426.
The Christian giving was divided between Protestants (mean of $1705) and Catholics ($984).
In contrast, Americans associated with non-Christian faiths gave away a mean of $905 during 2007. Atheists and agnostics provided an average of $467 to all non-profit organizations.
In 2004…Barna’s national study found that the people least likely to donate any money at all were…atheists and agnostics…A quarter or more…failed to give away any money in 2004.
Atheists and agnostics emerged as the segment of people least likely to do anything in response to poverty. They were less likely to engage in eight of the nine specific responses measured, and were the faith segment least likely to participate in eight of the nine responses evaluated.
giving material resources (such as clothing or furniture) directly to poor people
donating money to organizations that address poverty
giving food directly to a poor person or family
spending a "significant amount of time" praying for poor people
donating time to personally serve needy people in the community
visiting institutionalized elderly or sick people who are not family members
donating money to organizations that address poverty in foreign countries
serving as a tutor or friend to an underprivileged child
helping to build or restore a house for a poor family
exposure to pornography, using profanity in public, gambling, gossiping, engaging in sexual intercourse with someone to whom they were not married, retaliating against someone, getting drunk, and lying…
among skeptics (atheists and agnostics) participation in the eight behaviors ranged from a low of 11% (retaliating) up to a high of 60% (using profanity). While evangelicals averaged 6% participation in each of the eight behaviors mentioned, skeptics averaged five times that level (29%).
Other common acts among skeptics included exposure to pornography (50%), gossip (34%) and drunkenness (33%). People associated with faiths other than Christianity were twice as likely as evangelicals to engage in the behaviors explored.
Small but significant percentages of people said they would…drink more alcoholic beverages during the holidays, led by the under-25 crowd (12%), atheists and agnostics (11%) and liberals (11%).
Atheists and agnostics were the group most likely to do each of the following:recycle used materialsAdults without a faith preference [“i.e., atheists and agnostics”] were the segment least likely to do each of the following behaviors:
visit an adult-only website
view pornographic media
get legally drunk
have sexual intercourse with someone to whom they are not marriedvolunteer at a church or non-profit organization
stop watching a television program because of its values or viewpoints
fast for religious reasons
do at least 30 minutes of physical exercise in the past week
This segment has grown more quickly than any of the other five faith segments in the U.S. during the past decade.
abortion should be legal in all situations…40% of atheists.
abortion should either be illegal in all instances or illegal in all but a few special circumstances…30% of atheists.
44% of atheists…contend that a person is born into homosexuality.
The data clearly underscore the breadth of the gap in moral views between those associated with Christian churches and those associated with non-Christian faith groups or atheism.
55% of atheists and agnostics said this was a good idea to eliminate the Ten Commandments from government buildings…
37% of atheists and agnostics support the call to remove the phrase "In God We Trust" from the nation’s currency…
40% of atheists and agnostics side with the proposal calling for "removing the phrase ‘one nation, under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance"…
35% of atheists and agnostics “were comfortable with the [‘F-word’] word being used on broadcast channels.”
Atheists and agnostics…were also the least likely to look forward to spending time with friends.
Atheists and agnostics were most likely to rate their workplace as their top network
Atheists and agnostics…stood out as…least likely to find living near family and relatives to be highly desirable (43%, compared to 63% national average).
The religious skeptics were also much less likely to be driven to have a clear sense of purpose in life (55%, compared to 77% of all adults) or to want just one marriage partner for life (58% versus an 80% U.S. average).
They were also less interested in making a difference in the world (45%, versus 56% nationally) and in having close friendships…
The gap between born again adults and people of no faith (i.e., atheists and agnostics) was equally substantial. Not surprisingly, the born again contingent was much more likely to see themselves as servants of God, deeply spiritual, supportive of traditional family values, and concerned about American morality.
However, the religious segment was also distinguished by a greater likelihood of being active in their community; believing that they are making a positive difference in the world; are less likely to be turned off by politics; have greater clarity about the meaning and purpose of their life; and are much less adaptable to cultural change.
According to George Barna, “…atheists, whose fundamental dismissal of social conventions and participation in favor of more self-centered views and behaviors…"
A new evangelistic movement has emerged in America. Yet this effort does not spring from those loyal to a particular faith or religious view. The new evangelists are atheists. People who have determined there is no God or who doubt his existence (a group commonly known as agnostics) are adopting a more aggressive, intentional effort to discredit the notion that God exists and to critique people of faith…
most atheists and agnostics (56%) agree with the idea that radical Christianity is just as threatening in America as is radical Islam…
five million adults unequivocally use the label "atheist" and, when asked to describe the nature of God, staunchly reject the existence of such a being…
One of the most significant differences between active-faith and no-faith Americans is the cultural disengagement and sense of independence exhibited by atheists and agnostics in many areas of life. They are less likely than active-faith Americans to be registered to vote (78% versus 89%), to volunteer to help a non-church-related non-profit (20% versus 30%), to describe themselves as "active in the community" (41% versus 68%), and to personally help or serve a homeless or poor person (41% versus 61%)…
one of the least favorable points of comparison for atheist and agnostic adults - is the paltry amount of money they donate to charitable causes. The typical no-faith American donated just $200 in 2006, which is more than seven times less than the amount contributed by the prototypical active-faith adult ($1500).
Even when church-based giving is subtracted from the equation, active-faith adults donated twice as many dollars last year as did atheists and agnostics. In fact, while just 7% of active-faith adults failed to contribute any personal funds in 2006, that compares with 22% among the no-faith adults…
atheists and agnostics were more likely than were Christians to be focused…on acquiring wealth (10% versus 2%)…One of the largest gaps was the perception of being "at peace," a description less frequently embraced by no-faith adults (67% versus 90%)…
David Kinnaman, the president of The Barna Group, directed the study of the lifestyles and habits of no-faith adults in America, and pointed out some of the implications of the research. "…Proponents of secularism suggest that rejecting faith is a simple and intelligent response to what we know today. Yet, most of the Americans who overtly reject faith harbor doubts about whether they are correct in doing so. Many of the most ardent critics of Christianity claim that compassion and generosity do not hinge on faith; yet those who divorce themselves from spiritual commitment are significantly less likely to help others.
‘Ironically, however, both atheists and committed Christians share one unusual area of common ground: concern about superficial, inert forms of Christianity in America…
“there is a plethora of evidence that a comparison of all atheists to all Christians will not favor the former, whether one looks at crime rates, divorce rates, birth rates, democratic participation, or charitable giving.” [p. 182]
“[Sam] Harris claims that religious prudery contributes daily to the surplus of human misery while bemoaning the existence of AIDS in Africa and other sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. But this widespread disease is the direct result of the sexual promiscuity that Christians condemn as immoral and which Harris praises as the pursuit of happiness. More to the point, scientific research shows that religious individuals are both happier and more sexually satisfied than non-religious individuals.” [p. 119-120]
“Sam Harris cannot be trusted with statistics…Sometimes such deception is easy to detect. While talking about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in The End of Faith, Harris cites a study showing that abstinence-pledged virgin teens were more likely to engage in oral and anal sex in an attempt to create the impression that those teens were more likely to contract an STD. What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” [p. 127]
“I previously referenced the number of atheists being held by the prison system of England and Wales, where it is customary to record the religion of the prison population as part of the Inmate Information System. In the year 2000, there were 38,531 Christians of twenty-one different varieties imprisoned for their crimes, compared to only 122 atheists and sixty-two agnostics. As Europe in general and the United Kingdom in particular have become increasingly post-Christian, this would appear to be a damning piece of evidence proving the fundamentally criminal nature of theists while demonstrating that atheists are indeed more moral despite their lack of a sky god holding them to account.” [p. 19]
“However, there also happened to be another 20,639 prisoners, 31.6 percent of the total prison population, who possessed ‘no religion.’ And this was not simply a case of people falling through the cracks or refusing to provide an answer; the Inmate Information System is specific enough to distinguish between Druids, Scientologists, and Zoroastrians as well as between the Celestial Church of God, the Welsh Independent church, and the Non-Conformist church. It also features separate categories for ‘other Christian religion,’ ‘other non-Christian religion,’ and ‘not known.’ At only two-tenths of a percent of the prison population, High Church atheists are, as previously suggested, extremely law-abiding. But when one compares the 31.6 percent of imprisoned no-religionists to the 15.1 percent of Britons who checked ‘none’ or wrote in Jedi Knight, agnostic, atheist, or heathen in the 2001 national survey, it becomes clear that their Low Church counterparts are nearly four times more likely to be convicted and jailed for committing a crime than a Christian.” [p. 20]
“Studies have shown that those without religion have life expectancies seven years shorter than the average churchgoer,[*] are more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol, and be depressed or obese,[**] and they are much less likely to marry or have children. Their criminal proclivities strongly suggest that they are less intelligent on average than theists and High Church atheists alike, and they also outnumber their High Church counterparts by a significant margin, as the following table of various polls demonstrates:” [the table to which he refers are found on p. 20]
“It has been established that Christians give three times more to Charity[*] and are less criminal than the broad spectrum of atheists; experiments at the Economic Science Laboratory suggest that this might be because they believe that their actions are known to God. In variations on an envelope experiment designed to test random charity on the part of a subject who was given ten dollars as well as the opportunity to share it anonymously, the knowledge that the experimenter was watching increased the subject’s likelihood of giving by 142 percent and the amount given by 146 percent.[**]” [p. 145]
“Dennett further claims that ‘brights’ have better family values than born-again Christians based on ‘the lowest divorce rate in the United States’ which depends on the flawed 1999 Barna study instead of the 2001 ARIS study he makes use of later in the book, a much larger study that reaches precisely the opposite conclusion. It is certainly a quixotic assertion, considering that these family value atheists are half as likely to get married, twice as likely to divorce, and have fewer children than any other group in the United States. [p. 188]
