Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some sayings by a certain anonymous person who calls himself Bo Jinn and who has penned several books supposedly debunking atheism.

His claims are in italics, while my comments are in brackets.

●the Bible never describes God or what he looks like. He seems to manifest at times in the form of certain things like bushes and doves, but there is no reference in either the Koran or the Torah or the New Testament which indicates, for instance; that God is an old man with a white beard hovering around in the clouds.

(It's not just the burning bush and dove. The Bible claims that Moses have enjoyed regular meetings with God, talking to him “face to face, as one would speak to a friend”. Abraham walks alongside him, and Jacob has a wrestling match with him. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel each see God sitting on his throne, while Amos sees him standing in one of his temples. In the Gospels, Jesus not only boasts he has seen God, but is also said to have seated himself alongside God in the heavens, at his right hand. As do Stephen in the book of Acts, and the writer of Revelation, both of whom see God sitting enthroned in the heavens—you know, like “an old man with a white beard hovering around in the clouds.”)

●God is the point at which the theist humbles himself to the reality that he cannot understand everything with empirical certainty, because God exists in a non-empirical sense. Postulating a flying spaghetti monster or a “special computer” in God’s place is just a meaningless parody of a being that was never intended to have a face to begin with- at least not in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

(That’s the point of the argument. Nothing forbids a flying spaghetti monster from “existing in a non-empirical sense”—that he is invisible, inaudible, and imperceptible. Although Bo Jinn thinks that Christians have exclusivity over a being whose attributes are invisibility, inaudibility, and imperceptibility. So, according to him, if you were to imagine this being, you are imagining the Christian God, but you are calling him the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

●The theory of evolution is the sole theory which would seem to suggest that life on Earth could emerge causelessly and without “design”. In other words, if Darwinian evolution was ever compromised, the whole materialist house of cards would come a-tumbling down, and atheism along with it.

(No. An alternative to the theory of evolution is not creationism. If, somehow—although highly unlikely—evolution were to be proven wrong, it doesn’t mean that the world was created in six days by a wizard. The science still goes on, and it will find another way to explain how living creatures came to be.)

●However, given that the vast majority of scientific theories are revised, the odds are against the future of Darwinism.

(Ha, ha, no. Also, this guy calling evolution “Darwinism” tells you all you need to know about him.)

●what exactly are the findings in life’s origins that would have satisfied Richard Dawkins of the God’s existence? Are we expected to find some kind of scientific evidence pointing to a 4 billion year old bald man with a white beard, soaring over the Earth, sprinkling tiny molecules of DNA over our seas and oceans?

(That’s not Dawkin's fault, but rather that God or his workings are not defined. Bo Jinn already said that he doesn’t accept God as a “bald man with a white beard”, so his claim/ question is already inaccurate enough for this to be a non sequitur. I mean he is blaming Dawkins for not seeing in biology works of a being he wrongly describes (doesn’t believe). And since you can define God as you like, so you can say that God is the forces of nature, and his work is, thus, indistinguishable from nature.)

●The theist is not committed to an accurate description of God in order to maintain theism and reject atheism.

(There you go. He is not obliged to define how God works, but Dawkins is obliged to behave as if he did.)

●Do we have good grounds to reject the existence of Zeus? That depends on your interpretation of who/what Zeus is. If by “Zeus” one means to imply a statuesque, titan of a man hurling thunderbolts from the peak of Mount Olympus, then that is an empirically falsifiable claim. However, if by “Zeus” you mean an infinitely powerful, transcendental and necessary being, who exists as the overriding final and efficient cause of the universe and everything in it, then what you are calling “Zeus” is really “God”.

(There you go again: if you define God as a non-existing entity, then he miraculously “exists”. He obviously doesn’t need atheists to “kill” god—he’s doing it fine by himself. And yes, ancient Greeks did believe that Zeus was a titan of a man hurling thunderbolts from the peak of Mount Olympus.)

●The reason why western moral epistemology exists in its current state is because for centuries human beings believed in a moral ontology grounded in an overarching deity. By comparison, the only moral philosophies which secular humanism has contributed to the western world in the last fifty years is a strong push in favor of abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia. Everything else is the residue of a long Christian tradition and all the scruples of all the atheists in all the world are not going to change that.

(Ah, the old delusion that Christians invented morality. He must be so stupid to be oblivious that people had laws and lawgivers and even morality before Christianity. The laws and morality came naturally when people started living in communities—they discovered they needed rules to obey by—and, thus, little by little, they started creating laws. But then there is his claim that secular humanism did nothing to contribute to morality except for abortion and stem-cell research—which are actually useful—but secular humanism made the modern world possible. How? For starters it made people stop killing and discriminating each other for religious and other differences; it brought democracy; gave women equal rights; abolish slavery and servitude; etc.)

●Truthfully, if atheism is true and there is no absolute, transcendent moral truth, then if Hitler won the war and succeeded in creating his perverted new world order, he would be absolved, nay exalted for everything he had done. To invoke an adage often attributed to Chesterton himself; when people reject God it is not so much that they believe in nothing; it’s that they become capable of believing absolutely anything.

(What does it matter if Hitler won or lost the war for secular humanism to judge him? Inside the Nazi regime, Hitler was seen as righteous because he dictated the narrative, so there is no need to speculate on what would have happened inside the regime if he had won. However, secular humanism viewed him as wrong because it cherishes human feelings. Like, you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope or Hitler. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. Which can hardly be said about Christianity which collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Like when Pious XII kept quiet about the Holocaust and never regretted it, and then, after the war, pressed the allies to give clemency to Catholic Nazis—including those that ran the camps.
And then it gets even more absurd as he quotes Chesterton as a voice of reason—Chesterton, who was an anti-Semite.)