The Prodigal Atheist

  The way to understand something about the world was to steer a course between a belief in the universal power of reason and an unbending skepticism about our ability to know anything at all. Charles King     Perhaps the best way to understand why Christians and atheists see and interpret “miracles” differently is by understanding the difference between how two physicists looked at reality itself and saw two very different things. Those two physicists were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and while one studied classical physics and the motion of planets, the other studied the motion of subatomic particles, otherwise known as quantum mechanics.  Looking through the lens of classical physics, Einstein saw how planets operated in the universe in an orderly manner, obeying definite deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics. For the Christian, those laws were written and set in motion by the hand of God. Bohr, on the other hand, saw something different. He saw the wo...

Preface Understanding why people hold such radically different perspectives about miracles is much easier than explaining what those differences are and why people hold them as tightly as they do. At one end of the spectrum are those who simply "believe" a miracle comes from a God, and mostly because doing so evokes an emotional response that is undeniably real for them. At the other end of that spectrum is a way of looking at the world that is willing to let go of the comfort and security that comes from such a belief, despite how scary it can be to do so, in exchange for a deeper understanding about both the nature of reality and ourselves. What a person must ask themself before any attempt to understand miracles, or anything else for that matter, is what is more important to them: their beliefs or the truth? And if a conflict is found to exists between the two, which are they willing to sacrifice in order to follow in the footsteps of the other?     ...

  “Just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right,  it don't make it right.” Mark Twain   Tis the season to celebrate how easy it is for truth to be whatever you simply choose to believe it is, allowing one person’s mistranslation to become another person’s miracle of a virgin birth. More than the result of divine intercession, however, such a “miracle” is the result of a need to pretend to know the mind of an omnipotent intelligence better than any rudimentary understanding of linguistics, let alone the problems that arise from playing the telephone game. Ironic, yes, but not surprising in the least, given the history with which Christians have chosen to label those they feared for being different as “heretics” and “witches.” The question is why. To answer this question, we have to return to the third century BCE, when the confusion all began. At that time, the Hebrew Bible was being translated into the Greek Septuagint. In t...

 Christians burned witches and heretics. Think about that for a second. Are "witches" even a real thing? To Christians they were, and are, even if to everyone else they are simply projections of Christian fear masquerading as love of their brand of a "God." Why didn't God show those Christians who were burning those witches the "truth" about what they were doing? Well, apparently for the same reason that same God never revealed to those Catholic parents what some of those Catholic priests were doing to their own children: because witches are no more real than the Catholic conception of God. Ironically enough, like the witches they accused of magic and burned as necromancers, it is the Catholics who use sacramental hocus pocus to transform bread and wine into divine flesh and blood of an Apollo like man-god, that they then claim to eat and drink as a way of curing themselves of the sin-stained soul their own God assured they were born with, ...

Christianity has long demonized homosexuality as a sin by convincing its followers that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is the Bible's version of America's 9/11, with the divine attack being not only intended as punishment of homosexuals and all those who tolerated them, but also a warning to all future generations of God's willingness to nuke whole cities over who is kissing whom. Christian morality, as such, is based on the idea that it is right and good for God to firebomb whole cities for a "sin" that such an infinitely enlightened being freely chooses to be offended by, despite having created such homosexuals, and the entire universe in which they live in the first place. It's as if such a God created the universe for the sole purpose of creating something to be angry about.  In fact, this very same "God" is just as offended by the homosexuals he alone is responsible for creating just as much as he is offended by anyone who refuses to accept tha...