Atheists Who Claim, Among Other Things, That They've Read The Entire Bible

You ever wonder why so many atheists who claim they've read the entire Bible only ever talk about 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus, plus 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people? If you have, I certainly hope it didn't take you too long to figure out that it's because they're actually only ever read those 12 verses and 5 quotes.

Now let me be clear -- some atheists actually have read the entire Bible.



For example, a lot of academic Biblical scholars are atheists. I wouldn't be surprised if you're surprised to hear this: those academics don't tend to announce loud and proud that they're atheists, the way that New Atheists, aka movement atheists, tend to do. In fact, they tend to suck up to the huge rich religious institutions which butter their bread much too much to suit me. (NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH! NOT EVEN ME!)

Back to the movement atheists: who are they kidding? Each other, that's who. The nonsense about how they've all studied the entire Bible AND the Koran AND the Epic of Gilgamesh is a familiar example to anyone who's familiar with this movement. I came across another example today, a particularly striking example of an atheist kidding him- or herself: someone asking rhetorically why religious believers are so so desperate to gain the approval of atheists. I'll tell you why, Sparky: because they're not. Because you made that up.



But how do I know that so many movement atheists/New Atheists are making up that bit about having read the entire Bible? It's not just that they only mention those 12 verses and 5 snarky quotes over and over and over and over, and never mention Moses' confrontations of Pharaoh, or Ezra, and how it seems pretty clear now that it was Ezra and not Moses who collected and edited the Pentateuch, or Saul and Jonathon and David and Goliath and Solomon and Bathsheeba, or Job, or any of the particularly dramatic aspects of Revelation, or anything. If you've read all 2000 pages you've noticed more than those 12 verses. But over and above that, if there really was a community of Bible readers here, then people like Michael Paulkovich would get laughed out of that community long before being published in its leading periodicals. I'm not saying that Paulkovich hasn't read the entire Bible, it's just possible that he has. But it seems pretty likely that he's somehow managed to avoid any knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics which were written around the same time. That sort of avoidance is possible with one individual who's already gone to the trouble of reading the entire Bible, but extremely unlikely impossible in an entire close-knit community full of people thoroughly familiar with the Bible.

On the contrary, what we have here is a bubble, people sealing themselves off from those who actually have studied these ancients texts. Sealing themselves off and creating a fictional world in which religious believers are desperate for their approval and the entire Bible is like Leviticus and ancient Judea and Galilee were swarming with historians and there were newspapers and detailed court records so that anyone remotely resembling Jesus would have been mentioned in numerous non-Biblical written sources, a fictional world in which Muslims are either terrorists or approve of terrorism, and Obama is secretly an atheist because no Christians are as progressive politically as he is, and only religious believers teach Biblical studies in universities, and so forth.

Obviously, not all movement atheists/New Atheists are that wrong about all of the above. The point is that none of the above is immediately laughed out of the room, and all of it should be. All of the above is directly at odds with common knowledge. (Again -- maybe except for the part about the religious beliefs of academic Biblical scholars. Again, that may not be common knowledge, because the scholars tend to suck up too much to the religious institutions who give them all those fat grants and fellowships, and so they don't want to rock the boat by making their lack of belief too plain. The same way that almost none of the academics dare to rock the boat by voicing less than full certainty that Jesus existed. NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH!)

What's the point of shaking off nonsensical religious beliefs only to turn around and either constantly spout other nonsense, or act as if that other nonsense is fine because it's atheists who are spouting it? Sorry guys, but I'm not having it. The main point here is making sense. The existence or non-existence of God is just one of very many topics upon which we can make sense or not. You don't get a free pass from me on all those other topics just because we agree on that one.

(Review Of Why I Am An Atheist Who Believes In God By Frank Schaeffer) I Wonder Whether There's A Precedent For This Willy-nilly Re-Definition Of Terms:

-- "spiritual but not religious." "Followers of Christ but not Christians." "Jumbo shrimp." (Just kidding about about the term "jumbo shrimp;" it doesn't belong in this discussion because if the shrimp in question are unusually large, the term actually makes some sense.) And Now: The Amazing Story Of Frank Schaeffer, The Atheist Who Believed In God!



If it were not already quite enough that Schaeffer claims to be simultaneously a believer and an atheist -- oh, but it is, it is -- in this book Schaeffer claims never to have met an atheist nor a believer. Nonsense is one thing. Inconsistent nonsense is quite another, and writing "or" when "nor" is correct -- strike three, siddown, Schaeffer!

Just as there was a serviceable existing description of SBNR's etc -- they're Protestants -- so also is there a term for what Schaeffer is talking about in the title of his goofy new book: he's a Christian who has crises of faith now and then. If he had them a lot he might actually wake up someday and become a nice sensible atheist, but we really shouldn't hold our breath in Frank's case.

Nonsense Doesn't Matter Except That It's Everywhere

I wouldn't care much about Reza Aslan or his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazarethexcept that, imitating Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, Aslan's book was propelled to nationwide-#1-bestseller status in the wake of a stupid Fox News interviewer asking him how dare he, a Muslim, write about Jeebus. History has repeated itself as farce: Rushdie, a brilliant writer,was lifted to superstardom because religious fanatics were under orders to assassinate him; Aslan, a mediocre writer, has become a superstar because a Fox talking head said something hilariously stupid even by the standards of Fox. Aslan isn't stupid, but he's very, very far from writing as well as Rushdie, and his book is the 7-bazillionth example of the Jesus-as-Rorschach-test genre: we're all pretty much familiar with the New Testament Jesus; New Testament scholars, from Albert Schweitzer through John Dominic Crossan to Aslan, expand upon and/or depart from the basic familiar narrative and incorrectly label their work nonfiction. Not only did Nikos Kazantzakis write a much better Jesus story than those other three, he also called his version what it is, a novel.

I wouldn't care much about the assertions that the entire story of Jesus is copied from other myths, except that it's everywhere and it's proponents are every bit as resistant to discussion as any religious fanatic. List a dozen or so substantial variations from the myth of Oedipus, or Dionysis, or Hercules, or Perseus, or Osiris, or Theseus, or Prometheus, or Romulus, or Lucifer -- if you know any of those myths it's not hard to come up with a dozen ways in which the story of Jesus varies from each one of them -- and ask the turnip smugly smiling as he says that the Jesus story is 100% copied to respond to your objections to his thesis, and he'll respond as if he didn't hear your challenge at all, and chide you for not having read his favorite mouth-breathing author's book-length rant about how they did too steal it, and conclude that obviously your faith (doesn't matter a lick to him if you're an atheist) is obviously threatened by having come into the truth he's layin' down, and -- well, I'm sure you've met idiots yourself and know what they're like. The ones claiming that Jesus' story is 100% STOLEN -- they like to use the word "stolen" -- and that the Bible is a game of Telephone, these morons wouldn't matter much except that there are so many of them. (The story of the fictitious manuscript in the the preface to Umberto Eco's Il Nome Della Rosa --now THAT is a tale of a game of Telephone, which, although fictitious, will surely delight anyone who actually knows anything about the transmission of texts originating in the Middle Ages or earlier.)

Dan Brown wouldn't matter to me a bit if he hadn't sold hundreds of millions of copies of his silly books crammed with factual errors often taken for facts, in part because Brown insists they are facts when he isn't covering his ass by pleading that his books are just fiction.

Idiots who don't get that humans are warming the climate or who don't care wouldn't bother me if they weren't numerous enough to elect public servants.

Probably My Last Comments For a While About Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie

My third post about this book, following this post and this one.

If you know more than a dozen Christians personally, chances are that the main thrust of this book will be quite familiar to you: an embodiment of Nietzsche's definition of faith as "Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist;" nonstop elaboration of the dimensions and qualities and implications and effects of that which is not, accompanied by a stubborn refusal to consider even for a moment the reality of anything which is real, and frequent childish denunciations of reality and its fans. With Bible verses cited occasionally. What makes Barth unusual is that this everyday, thoroughly pedestrian, utterly mediocre content is transmitted in elegantly convoluted prose employing a large vocabulary and frequent sprinklings of Latin and occasional references to Greek. Barth is a fine example of someone who received an excellent education which didn't work. Much like William F Buckley in that regard.

Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie up to page 18

This might be my last post on Barth's book. Not only has it been hugely disappointing so far, but it's extremely familiar: I'm finding in this book many of the harebrained assertions currently en vogue in Christian and also Jewish theology, or at least in the versions of those disciplines or undisciplines (How disciplined is it to make things up willy-nilly in order to defend one's preconceived notions?) which make it onto the Huffington Post. Either HP's theologians have been greatly influenced directly or indirectly by Barth, or else they and Barth share important influences.

Or maybe this is actually as close as theology can come to making sense. (Not close!)

As I mentioned in my first post on this book of Barth's, Barth wastes no time in making the untenable and insulting assertion that everyone has a God or gods, and that therefore everyone is a theologian, the only question is: what kind of theologian? From this point he rushes, as any sensible German would agree, "von einem Kurzschluss zum naechsten," from one premature conclusion to the next. He describes the God of the progressive person and of the "deified progressiveness" as a human being with all sorts of nasty qualities: aloofness, contempt, deadliness, a God of No, bringing Bad News directly opposed to the Good News of the Gospels, from which people would flee if only they could, and he throws in terms such as "Uebermensch" just in case anyone might have any doubt that he was implying that progressivism, humanism and National Socialism are all one and the same.

Nazis may have referred to themselves as "progressive." That doesn't mean that it made any sense at all when they did, any more than when Barth implied that German progressives in the 1960's were like Nazis. The Nazis were of course thoroughly regressive, regressing back to a time when the primary occupation of the Germanic times was war. Barth is also regressive, harkening back to a time of unquestioning belief in the fairy tales of the New Testament. Of course I greatly prefer Barth's regression to that of the Nazis, and of course Barth resisted the Nazis in a very courageous manner. But still he's building an entirely fictitious world here and insisting that it's real. And perpetuating the fiction of the Nazis that they were Nietzscheans, when in fact Nietzsche despised antisemitism and did all that he could to keep his sister from associating his name with it. But Nietzsche suddenly went insane in 1889, leaving his sister in charge of his estate, and she published altered editions of his work and actively associated his name with so much that he despised, and in 1935 Hitler attended her funeral. The false association of Nietzsche and the Nazis persisted for quite a while, but one expects to find it mostly among non-German non-academics. To find it in the work of a German professor who is considered to represent the twentieth-century epitome of his field is downright discouraging, even if that field is only Protestant theology.

And by the way, yes, I am referring to Barth's theology as Protestant, not Evangelical. Yes, the German words "protestantisch" and "evangelisch" look very much like the English words "Protestant" and "Evangelical," but they do not mean exactly the same. There is no exact English equivalent for either of those German terms, but "Protestant" is much closer than "Evangelical" to "evangelisch." Thst's how these things go sometimes. Yes, I know that other English translations of Barth say "Evangelical." They're wrong.

So, Barth says that everyone has a God. He goes on to say that the God of progressives is horrible, cold, distant, negating -- basically either a Nazi or potentially a Nazi -- and then compares this imaginary God to his equally-imaginary friend, "the God who is the subject of Protestant theology," who in and with mankind wishes to accomplish a helpful, healing, correcting work which will bring joy and peace. How nice! And what a stark contrast to that awful, awful God of progressivism which doesn't exist outside of his imagination any more than his own wonderful Protestant God does.

This is the sort of gibberish which is considered by many Christian theologians to represent the very best any of them has ever accomplished. And perhaps they're right.

The First Couple of Pages of Karl Barth's Einfuehrung in die evangelische Theologie

I received my copy of Karl Barth's Einführung in die evangelische Theologiein the mail yesterday and began reading it right away. I began writing notes about it, and it occurred to me that I might want to write a review of the book here in The Wrong Monkey after I was done reading. But then I decided not to wait that long, because I don't know how long it will take me to read the entire book, and because I already have quite a few notes. Maybe I won't have much to say about the rest of the book. (Or maybe I'll write many blog posts about it, who knows.)

The first thing to say is that I hate this simple-minded crap, as I have hated all of the theology I've read so far in my life. So why am I reading Barth if I hate him? Same reason I've read some -- not all. Shuddering at the very thought -- of Augustine and Aquinas and other Christian "thinkers" -- because Christianity continues to rule a very large portion of the Earth. Perhaps I will actually like some parts of this book by Barth. I continue to hope that someday I'll find some theological writing, Christian or otherwise, which I find interesting. But to be frank, that hope is fading.

Well no, that's not entirely true, not if you consider the writing of Hesiod and some of that of Homer and Ovid to be theological -- and why shouldn't you? I love that stuff. But it's so very different from Christianity. It's true that Christians were sometimes systematically persecuted by some ancient pagan Roman Emperors, who tried to stamp them out. One of the chief recurring pagan charges against the Christians was impiety. Christian apologists have pointed to this as evidence that the pagans simply didn't understand Christianity, but these apologists, most of them, don't understand what piety was to the Romans: it was a respect for every religion and every deity on the face of the Earth. Don't worry, I'm not about to become a pagan. I don't agree with any concept of piety, but I find this pagan inclusiveness much more sympathetic than any monotheism. It has a lot in common with the multiculturalism of today, and, if I have not been misinformed, with some strains of Hinduism and Buddhism. Naturally, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and every other sort of monotheist flew straight in the face of piety as the Romans defined it.

Back to Barth. Right off the bat, at the very beginning of Einführung in die evangelische Theologie, he offends me by making a very familiar assertion: that everyone has a God or gods and that therefore everyone is a theologian. Over and over again in "modern," "enlightened" Christianity there's this attempt to drag everyone down to their level. Is this sort of thing familiar to me because the contemporary theologians I know are all, directly or indirectly, influenced by Barth? Or does Barth merely swim in the same putrid stream as they? What about apes, Karl? Are they all theologians too? And dogs and cats?

I don't want to assume things and then believe them -- I'll leave that to Barth and his ilk -- but I wonder whether Barth would entertain for a moment my question about apes and cats and dogs and whether they, too, are all theologians. Most theologians, of course, would dismiss such a thought with a contemptuous snort, betraying that their image of mankind comes not from science, because of course science tells us that we share our DNA with other species, and they evolve just as we do (some of us anyway), but from the Genesis legend, which portrays man as a thing apart. (Unfortunately many biologists obviously still follow the Genesis legend rather than science inasmuch as they reject out of hand, in the face of ever-mounting evidence, the very possibility that animals may possess certain qualities and states of consciousness traditionally -- at least in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition -- thought to belong to mankind alone.)

Barth says that "we" -- presumably "we humans" -- are all theologians, and then he loses me even more thoroughly by revealing that the theology he follows has all to do with the Bible and particularly with the Gospels, the Evangelium, that God Himself, the Creator of All, the Infinite, has expressed Himself most clearly in Bible, and in the Bible especially in the New Testament, and in the New Testament especially in the Gospels. (Note the complete contrast to pagan Roman piety or modern multiculturalism.) He wrote that in 1962, after centuries of textual criticism of the Old and New Testaments, after the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library and thousands of scraps of papyrii at Oxyrhynchus, and he is considered by many Christian theologians to still represent the state of the art of theology, and that's just about the most damning thing I can think of to say about Christian theology. So many books in this world, such a big world, so many discoveries piling up concerning the world around us and things long ago, and we can see so far and ever farther beyond this Earth into regions which make it look tiny indeed, and the man many Christian theologians call the greatest philosopher of the 20th century insisted that the key to understanding Everything is distilled into Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It was a pretty silly notion when those four books were freshly written, and the more we learn the sillier, the more infuriatingly, arbitrarily narrow-minded it becomes.