As with absolutely every condemnation of the Bible, its God, Jesus and Christians found within evilbible.com we must, yet again, note that this condemnation of hypocrisy goes unsubstantiated since is it premised upon an atheist worldview whereby condemnation of anything at all amounts to mere assertions based on emotive and impotent arguments from outrage.
This time evilbible.com’s author is not the author but borrowed an “essay” written by a certain Charlotte who wrote a series entitled, “The Church of Theists Suck [sic].” These were previously posted on a website that was entitled “Theists Suck” yet, “Theists Suck” is dead and gone and only a portion of it lives on at evilbible.com.
Evilbible.com’s author calls them “essays” but Charlotte prefers to term them “sermons.”
Beyond this, the only things I know about Charlotte is that she is an “ATHEIST WOMAN,” she is very, very, very very angry and she is very, very, very, very ignorant of even the most basic biblical concepts and contents. It is no wonder that evilbible.com’s author found a comrade in her since they share these common afflictions and others such as self-servingly convenient selective quotations, manipulation of biblical texts and their readership via propagandizing, simply being all around illogical and have a propensity for employing school yard bully style vocabulary into their writings.
We will find that the overwhelming majority of everything that Charlotte had to say is premised upon the same fallacy. She lays this out in toto at the end of her “sermon” and so while we will chip away at it throughout we will conclude by shooting down her supposed fool proof shoot down of Christians after considering other arguments.
Of primary importance it must be pointed out that, in reality, Charlotte’s entire “sermon” can be discredited beyond repair by simply making one or two points:
1) If she wants to charge Christians with hypocrisy we could merely say, “Right you are, shame on us”-period.
2) Or: since God, Jesus, the Bible, Christianity do not teach the attaining of perfection on this side of heaven Christians cannot be logically charged with hypocrisy.
That is all that there really is to discrediting both Charlotte and evibible.com’s approval of her “sermon” in one fell swoop. Yet, I will dissect her “sermon” as I know that atheist are very un-skeptical and will generally believe whatever they are told about the Bible by another atheist without question.
Charlotte’s angry, misguided and expletive peppered condemnation begins by noting:
[Christians’] willful ignorance of the Bible combined with their two faced idealism to preach it, has made us sick, hasn’t it? For nearly two thousand years Biblicists have been lecturing people on the importance of adhering to the Bible’s teachings on ethics, manners, and morality_The problem with their approach lies not only in an oft- noted failure to practice what they preach, but an equally pronounced tendency to ignore what the Bible itself, preaches. Christians practice what can only be described as “selective morality”. What they like, they cling to and shove down other’s throats; what they don’t like, they ignore vehemently_even the validity of calling oneself “Christian” is in question_[they] don’t even PRETEND to heed other, equally valid, maxims_This one [“sermon”] is going to sum up the rest of my beefs.
This premise, this reference to “beefs” and the examples of malice and ignorance that follows denotes a webpage that is more akin to a “My Dear Diary” entry.
Section one is entitled, “Hypocrisy of Marital Relationships” and revolves around the idea that the Bible ideally allows for divorce only due to adultery yet,
80% of this country is Christian yet we have a 50% divorce rate. A majority of divorces are a result of irreconcilable differences, not adultery, which implies that Christians are again practicing selective morality. How many Christians are working on a second, third or fourth marriage?
The primary response to this sort of condemnation is, of course, to say AMEN!!! She is quite correct; there are Christians who are not living up to the biblical standard.
Yet, even with such large numbers of Christians divorcing it is noteworthy that,
atheists are 58.7 percent more likely to get divorced than Pentecostals and Baptists, the two born-again Christian groups with the highest rate of divorce, and more than twice as likely to get divorced than Christians in general.1
Also, that,
What needs mentioning is the fact that many atheists do not cohabit as a prelude to marriage. They in fact see cohabitation as “equivalent” to any marriage relationship_a whopping 37% of atheists never marry as opposed to 19% of the American population_Not only do atheists cohabit and break up in very large numbers, they also do not marry in very large numbers.2 [emphasis in original]
And yet, it is not condemnatory that atheists divorce because an absolutely materialistic universe does not call for the fidelity of bio-organisms living on a little dot in the middle of the universe’s nowhere and so they are violating nothing when they divorce.
The next section is entitled “On to another beef“
The Christian attempts to put prayer into schools run directly counter to biblical teachings. Jesus said prayer should be a private affair devoid of public display: “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room (or closet.) and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret…” (Matthew 6:5-6 RSV). Biblicists violate this on a regular basis and have no intention of correcting their behavior_Christians continuously pray in public, IE: churches, street corners, schools, courts, etc. yet all the while they never stop to think this is in direct violation to the god they pray to.
This actually is the goal of many atheists; to push Christians out of public view, the public square and into their closets with the lights out under a blanket. Many atheist countries already and literally do this, by the way.This is rather interesting as Jesus is being quoted, the very same Jesus who attended the Temple and who prayed in public, in front of people such as in Matthew 14:19 when he prayed before “about five thousand men, besides women and children.” Then perhaps it is not merely Christians who are hypocrites but Christ Himself.
Yet, note that Charlotte is parsing the thought behind the text in order to make her point; the thought is just as was quoted,
when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men.
It is clear that the thought is that the, actual, hypocrites where praying that way just to make a show of their supposed godliness. In counter distinction is it better to completely remove yourself from the public. Yet, since the thought, the context, is about not putting on a fake show of godliness and Jesus prayed in public it is not a condemnation of public prayer but is, in typical Jewish fashion, counterbalancing one extreme with another: as if to say that if they do this you do that.
This is in keeping with the preceding verses which read:
Take heed that you do not do your merciful deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in Heaven.Therefore when you do your merciful deeds, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may have glory from men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward.
But when you do merciful deeds, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, so that your merciful deeds may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret Himself shall reward you openly.
That was the point; do not do it just to be seen and draw attention to yourself.
Next, Charlotte plays the part of a mind reader and pretends to know why Christians want prayer in public:
I, of course, know why this is voluntarily ignored. Public prayer forces the peers of school children to jump on the band wagon and pray. We are all aware that the church is simply a business which employs tactics similar to that of tobacco industries in recruiting consumers_I find it humorous that other businesses warn their consumers on the package that it is dangerous to one’s health while Churches don’t put warning labels on the bible for the pornography and immorality it contains. The psychological damage organized religion causes is notably prevalent. Cancer from smoking and cirrhosis from drinking is JUST AS HARMFUL as the psychosis believers develop concerning reality.
The “I see demons” complex is more rampant in Christians then it is in acid dropping space cadets. I am not saying this as a joke. There are literal studies done on this topic and they are in accordance to what I am conveying here.
As for as being harmful, I wrote about how harmful, in fact tormenting, it was for me to be raised in an utterly secular home in my essay Torture, the Hell of Atheism and the “Gentle Pedophile”. She not only claims to know why but to also know that it is voluntary ignorance. What she does not seem to consider with regards to the “pornography and immorality it contains” is that it is mentioned within a framework which places it into an ethical context. In other words, the “pornography and immorality” are not gratuitous but are meant as lessons and guides. This is tantamount to discrediting a newspaper for reporting immoral actions. Remember: just because it is found in the Bible does not mean that the Bible is giving its approval.
I would love to read her absolute atheist standard of immorality, by the way but, of course, it is not provided but merely asserted. As to the “I see demons” complex it may be of interest to note that there are literal studies that demonstrate that secular people are far more superstitious than Christians. This is because Judeo-Christian theism or even superstition, if you wish, is confined within an internally consistent framework, it has parameters, whereas for secularists anything goes and so they go for anything:
The Wall Street Journal provided the following report:
“From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace. The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith – it’s what the empirical data tell us.’What Americans Really Believe,’ a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians_
While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things [dreams foretelling future, existence of Atlantis, haunting, necromancy, Bigfoot and Nessie], only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did_In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.”3
Ponder these things my friends and we will pick it up next time: same bat time, same bat channel.
- Atheism, EvilBible.com, “Theists Suck” and Christians are Hypocrites, part 2 of 6
- Atheism, EvilBible.com, “Theists Suck” and Christians are Hypocrites, part 3 of 6
- Atheism, EvilBible.com, “Theists Suck” and Christians are Hypocrites, part 4 of 6
- Atheism, EvilBible.com, “Theists Suck” and Christians are Hypocrites, part 5 of 6
- Atheism, EvilBible.com, “Theists Suck” and Christians are Hypocrites, part 6 of 6
