by WizenedSage ~    Thanks to Carl S. for the idea. W hen the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door, this is what I wish I had said… Men lie. We have all lied; most of us many, many times. In fact, lying among humans is so common that there are currently at least 700 different creator deities worshipped in the world today. TODAY! So, when we come across a wild or outrageous religious claim, shouldn’t we always ask, did someone lie? And isn’t that the most likely, almost certain truth of the matter, EVERY TIME?   

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ T he believer insists that the universe requires a maker, a god. I would ask him, "How do you know there is only one god?" From what we can see and measure in this world, how can we be sure there are not many gods; perhaps 3 or 4, or 5 or 10, or 30 or 40? How could we know? Perhaps one god created the stars, another created the oceans, another the land, another the plants, another the animals, etc. How could we know? Can we be sure this is not the case? Even the Bible suggests there is more than one god. In the Psalms, there are these passages: “There is none like you among the gods, O Lord” (86:8); “For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; he is to be revered above all gods” (96:4); “Our Lord is above all gods” (135:5); “He is exalted above all gods” (97:7); “For Yahweh is a great god, and a great king above all gods” (95:3). In Exodus Yahweh predicts that he will execute judgments “on all the gods of Egypt” (12:12). ...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ Y ou may have seen this recent article . It described a survey of Christian Americans undertaken by psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the study, 511 Americans, roughly two-thirds male and three-quarters Caucasian, looked through hundreds of pairs of faces and chose which they thought looked most like god. At this point in the article I began laughing. Essentially, the researchers were asking what these people thought an invisible being looked like! Now, last I knew, “in-visible” meant not visible. So how could this god’s face be said to look like anything? And isn’t god supposed to be a spirit being? How does a spirit have a face? Anyway, the respondents thought god would not look like the most popular representations of an old, white-bearded, Caucasian male god, but rather, younger and friendlier – although still a male Caucasian. Even most women and many blacks agreed on this. I had to ask myself, wouldn’t the h...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) I n May of 2017, Gallup released the results of a poll concerning adult Americans’ Bible beliefs. The poll found that 24% of Americans were “literalists.” That is, they believe the Bible is “'the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word.” Obviously, these people are nearly beyond reach in their superstition as they routinely brush aside any and all argument and evidence that doesn’t fit the literalist stance. At the other end of the spectrum are 26% who - like most regular visitors to this site - see the Bible as “a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” In other words, it’s essentially a compendium of make-believe. In the middle then, is the remaining half of all adult Americans, a full 50%, who believe the Bible is the inspired word of God but that not all of it should be taken literally. It is this group of people that I wish I could reach with an extremely important message, taken directly...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I get TheHumanist.com newsletter in my e-mail regularly. There was a reprint of an interesting article in the latest edition. It was originally published on Stream.org , a right-wing news site. The original article was by Tom Gilson, a senior editor with The Stream. The title of the article was, “ Christianity, Women, and How Atheists Avoid the Facts That Matter .” The article deals with an item that was on a Virginia television station’s news, and the video had gone viral. It seems that Tom Hicks, an atheist, had painted a message on the back of his pickup truck. The message read, “Women shall be silent and submissive 1 Cor. 14:34,” adding, “God said it, believe it,” and “Read your Bible.” The article’s author, Mr. Gilson, takes issue with Mr. Hick’s message, claiming atheists like him routinely avoid most of the “real” facts. Gilson wrote, “Hicks wasn’t trying to preach Bible truth. According to WTVR, ‘Hicks said the reason behind the verse is ...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I t seems to me that god believers should be very concerned that science has failed to find any trace of positive evidence that god exists. Given science’s amazing track record of predicting, discovering, measuring, and describing dozens of invisible things, some with only very tiny effects on our material world, why is there still no tangible, reproducible evidence of the existence of a god, an entity which supposedly created and supports the continued existence of everything else? My claim here is that if there is a god which interacts in any way with our world, science should by now have measured, at least statistically, some effects of that interaction. Somewhere there should be some data that simply cannot be explained by purely natural causes. Yet, while scientists have scoured, tested, and measured the earth and the heavens for thousands of years, they have yet to uncover that data. Of course, this failure of science to find god goes back as ...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I n the March 2017 edition of Freethought Today , the monthly newspaper of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, there was a letter from Russell Gregory of Pennsylvania which caught my eye. Mr. Gregory wrote, “Imagine if everyone believed in that adage ‘Live and Let Live.’ No one would have any desire to change a single person. In fact, everyone would show great respect for each person’s belief. There would be no attempts at conversion,” etc. At first blush, Mr. Gregory’s utopia sounds great, but as I thought further on the issue, I began to find serious problems with it. First and foremost, what about the children? If no one questions the religious, they will simply continue to indoctrinate their children with their superstitions, as they always have. Those children will be left severely deprived of knowledge of how the world really works. They will be naïve, overly trusting, gullible, and believe that one’s feelings can actually prove things ab...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ O ver the past few weeks, I have been embroiled in a fascinating debate on the Letters to the Editor pages of our local weekly newspaper here in Maine. It all started when a neighbor, our own Carl S. in fact, wrote a letter questioning whether the Roman census that allegedly brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem from Nazareth actually happened. A man responded to Carl’s letter, disputing Carl’s claims. At that point, I couldn’t resist chiming in myself in defense of Carl, so the next week my letter (#1) was published. Letter #1 "The Roman Census Revisited" To the editor: These past two weeks there has been an interesting debate on these pages concerning the Roman census said to have caused Jesus’ parents to travel to Bethlehem from their home in Nazareth. According to Carl Scheiman, there was no such census, while Henry Simmons claims there was. I think Mr. Simmons misunderstood. Scheiman wrote, “a decree went forth from Caesar Augus...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) A ll positive social changes of a sweeping nature seem to involve a tipping point. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights for blacks, and broad social acceptance of gays all appeared to be beyond the reach of Americans just a few generations ago. Those who spoke out and worked to overturn the entrenched, tradition-bound norms were often judged to be tilting at windmills, or trying to turn the tide with a spoon. And yet, in each case, a generation eventually came along which achieved the improbable, and the norms of all of these except slavery were overturned within the last 100 years - the last two, civil rights for blacks and broad acceptance of gays, both within my adult lifetime. There may be some lessons here regarding a tipping point for our country’s religious saturation, as I shall explain. I went to a small city high school of about 1,200 students during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and didn’t know of a single gay student ...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I n a Pew Research poll of 2010 , it was found that atheists and agnostics, on average, had a greater knowledge of Christianity than Christians. Apparently, the average Christian doesn’t spend a lot of time reading the Bible or actually thinking about his religion. This is written to help Christians to examine their religion more closely. Of course most Christians will stop reading at this point, thinking that to question their faith is a sin against god. I contend that to avoid thinking is a very regressive and foolish policy. After all, thinking is what got us out of the caves and into houses, and – if you wish - out of false ancient religions and into modern ones. If god and/or nature gave us brains, then surely we were meant to use them. Through my own study of Christianity, I have arrived at 5 questions about Jesus that seem to me to present very serious logical problems for Christianity. Surely there are other very good questions, but I think...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ A mong Christian apologists, what is termed “ The Fine-Tuning Argument ” appears to be one of the most popular arguments for the existence of a god. The hypothesis is that there are numerous physical constants and conditions that must be met to very close tolerances before life could arise and be sustained in our universe, so this universe must be the work of a creator god. He may not have been the first to propose this particular counter-argument, but the novelist Douglas Adams penned the following clever insight - one of my favorites: “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller a...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ R ecently, on Pathos.com , I came across an interesting essay by Andrew Kaethler, an Assistant Professor at Catholic Pacific College. The title of the essay is “ Faith Undergirds All Reason .” He argues that without faith, reason can’t really get off the ground. As Kaethler explains, the great French philosopher René Descartes wanted to discover what he could know with absolute certainty. He concluded that the only thing he could know for sure was that he was a thinking thing; i.e., “I think therefore I am.” He reasoned that he couldn’t know anything else actually existed for certain because he couldn’t prove he was not simply (as Kaethler put it), “a brain floating in a vat which is manipulated by an evil demon to see images that falsely appear as the external world .” Thus, Descartes concluded that the only way out was a leap of faith. He conjectured therefore, and Kaethler agrees, that god is good and would not deceive him; the external world is...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ C arl S. recently shared a small quarterly magazine with me that provided a ton of laughs and tickled my curiosity. It was titled, “ Venture Inward ; the magazine of Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment .” From Wikipedia: “Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) was an American mystic who answered questions on subjects as varied as healing, reincarnation, wars, Atlantis, and future events while claiming to be in a trance. A biographer gave him the nickname, ‘The Sleeping Prophet .’. . . Some consider him the true founder and a principal source of the most characteristic beliefs of the New Age Movement.” The book advertisements in this magazine provided a taste of what Cayce and this organization are all about. Much of Cayce’s “work” had nothing to do with religion, yet he could perhaps be described as a heretical Christian. The title of one of the books advertised is “ Edgar Cayce’s Past Lives of Jesus ,” and it doesn’t get much more heretica...

by WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I n our regular Sunday morning meetings of the “Church of the Angry Apostates,” Carl S. and I have found ourselves repeatedly coming back to an interesting question: how do clergy commit egregious crimes against humanity, if they really believe they are being watched and judged by an all-powerful god? A few examples from the “ Black Collar Crime Blotter ” of the Freethought Today newspaper, published by the Freedom from Religion Foundation , will serve to set the stage. Loan Pop, a Romanian Orthodox priest, was convicted and sentenced for sexual assaults on 8 young adult women between 1999 and 2013. One woman testified that she was molested after seeking help from Pop while her husband was in a coma after a car accident. Henry L. McGee, lead pastor at first Baptist Church in Austin, Texas , is accused of committing sexual acts with a girl starting in 2014, when she was 13. The girl told detectives that McGee had sex with her more than 15 time...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ R ecently, out of curiosity, I Googled, “Why are there no miracles anymore?” I wanted to know how Christian bloggers would handle this question. I found their answers to be all over the map. And everyone is an expert, it seems, since each appeared to be absolutely certain he had the correct answer. There were some other interesting viewpoints in their responses, as well. For example, one writer claimed the “main miracle [the resurrection] happened and that we have been given enough evidence to believe without a miracle. After we come to grips with the fact that our unbelief is sin whether we've seen a miracle with our own eyes or not…” So, we heathens aren’t just wrong because we don’t believe in the resurrection, we are sinners. Now that’s what I call leading with the fear card. You better believe, or else… Christian bloggers’ opinions on the miracle question varied from those who agreed there are no miracles in our times to those who bel...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ T his past Sunday, at our local book store café “church of the non-believers” meetup, my friend Carl S. gave me a flyer which just blew me away. It was something his wife had picked up at her Assembly of God church the week before. On the cover of this flyer was a starry night scene with the silhouettes of three dudes on camels approaching a manger which was right under an especially bright star. You know the scene. Inside the flyer, on the left panel, was a series of notices concerning the local church; birthday and anniversary notices, notes on the planned Christmas dinner for the needy, etc. On the right panel was a drawing of a dandelion blowball with the words “BELIEVE for GREATER THINGS” under it. Below this were the words “2016 PRAYER FOCUS.” Okay, now we are ready for the main message, right? And sure enough, at the bottom of the page was this passage, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and ...