Reddit reviews The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails
We found 16 Reddit comments about The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
> tell me all of the reasons why the bible is flawed
That's rather a tall order. There are many perspectives from which it is flawed, and within many of those, a great many problems.
Are you after things like contradictions? Then see this question in the FAQ
Are you after finding out how the New Testament was altered again and again, and why? Then you may want to try to get the book Misquoting Jesus
Are you interested in common mistaken claims about and hidden contradictions in the New Testament? Maybe you'd enjoy Jesus, Interrupted
Are you interested in finding out which parts of the new testament were written by people claiming to be someone else? Then try Forged
Are you interested in whether there's solid evidence Jesus existed at all? Then try Nailed
Are you interested in refuations of many Christian ideas by a bunch of different authors? Then try The Christian Delusion
and so on and so on...
> I also plan on telling my family about my new found Athiesm soon so, any advice in that regards would be greatly appreciated.
Please read the advice in the FAQ. This is not a decision to be taken lightly.
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> why Athiesm is your preferred route
That's atheism (small a, e before i). It's not a choice, any more than I chose not to believe in leprechauns or Santa or flying monkeys. At some point I found I didn't have belief in these propositions. Discovering there weren't any gods I believed in made me without-god-belief. That's literally a-theism.
If they do, I haven't found them, and it's not for lack of looking. Neither has Lohn Loftus, who also made the same argument in his book "The Christian Delusion". Neither have the Christians of Reddit, I've brought it up multiple times and the only 2 real answers yet are something like "god doesn't give a shit about us", which, well, kind of goes against the god talked about in the bible a bit, and "evolution is false", which is just flat out ignorant.
Edit: Platinga (probably Christendom's best philosopher) takes on a subset of this argument(doesn't address the blaming humans part) and comes up with a 3rd answer: Blame Satan.
This is but one of the many reasons I am a fairly recent ex-Christian.
I'm an atheist, and most will hate me for this, but I don't recommend The God Delusion. There are better books, and Dawkins is much better when he writes about biology.
Atheist worldview book: I recommend Sense and Goodness without God by Richard Carrier
Books about Christianity (there are so many to recommend, but these are some favorites):
I'm a big fan of Spong, so I would recommend any of his books. Also Robert M. Price is worth looking into, he has lots of free sermons and writings available from when he was a liberal pastor and theologian, which he is not anymore.
No... there are other, far more effective psychological reasons for following religions. John Loftus' book The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails explains it pretty well in the first three chapters or so, written by atheist expert anthropologists and psychologists.
i cut and pasted this from nuke the pope i will give a link to it at the bottem ...
>I'm just reading John Loftus' The Christian Delusion, a collection of experts' essays challenging various bits of Christian doctrine. I've just started on chapter 14, where Hector Avalos refutes Dinesh D'Souza's claptrap about Hitler & Co. (is that what's in your video? I can't watch it right now).
>There's some controversy about Hitler's personal views, though those are not nearly as important as the views he espoused in public. So Avalos basically ignores those, whatever they may have been, and instead explains how many centuries of Church-propagated anti-Semitism contributed most significantly to the Holocaust. A couple of pages beyond where I've read, he apparently also demolishes the silly claims about Hitler and Darwinism as engines of genocide. Instead, from what I've briefly skimmed, he points to the Bible as a strong precedent for and proposition of genocide.
>I'm already past Avalos' brief mention of Stalin. His mass murders arguably had nothing to do with atheism, but with enforced collectivization - those who refused to submit to the collective "for the greater good" had to be eliminated. Ironically, the move toward collectivization parallels that found in the Bible and preached by Jesus. Avalos quotes a passage where a man and woman are killed for failing to participate in the collective. Today we condemn the idea that the collective is more important than the lives of human beings, but the Bible actually propagates it. I've been meaning to follow a reference Avalos makes where he says that recent document finds have actually exposed participation and complicity of the Eastern Church in Stalin's operations toward collectivization. It's really amazing how religion tends to show up behind many activities we consider evil!
He also points out that the "numbers games" Christians like to play with regard to numbers killed is petty and meaningless. Christianity may point out that "only" 100,000 witches were burnt in the Dark Ages, while WW2 killed 10 million. Some counter arguments:
For whatever it's worth, when someone insists on arguing numbers, I point out that the Christianization of Europe alone cost an estimated 8 million lives; the 30 Years War (between Catholicism and Protestantism) wiped out a third of Germany's population (+ more elsewhere)... and these numbers are all the more impressive because there simply weren't that many people around in those times. But for those folks arguing about genocides "under the banner of atheism" I point to the Spanish, Portugese and other "conquistadores" who invaded the Americas and wiped out much of the population of these two continents, with estimates (as looked up in Wikipedia) ranging as high as 200 million. You folks sure you want to play this game? ;)
here is the link http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/h5hro/hitler_stalin_mao_pol_pot_blah_blah_blah/c1sqjqs
I got kind of lazy with the links, but anyways here is my collection of Christianity related books, links etc.
Listening:
Books:
Links
That Jesus was just another failed Jewish apocalyptic prophet.
Read about a book full of such things in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails.
Good work!
Also, if you're interested in some deep exposures of the effects of Christianity upon humanity, you might want to check out:
https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Not-Great-Faith-Fails/dp/1616149566
I just bought the book, and reading the book's foreword blew me away. Can't wait to get further into it!
Also:
https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689
https://www.amazon.com/End-Christianity-John-W-Loftus/dp/1616144130
>1) How do we explain that we all seem to know what is right and wrong? Why do we believe that being a human entitles someone to rights?
Evolved Morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-biology/#EvoBioDebMor
 
>2) Why do we all look for and want meaning if this is a meaningless world?
Again, evolution.
We are hardwired to find meaning where there may be one because at some point it was advantageous to our survival.
 
>3) How can we know what is true? If our brains have evolved to ensure our survival and not necessarily tell us what is true... how can we be sure of anything?
The thing is that "being right" is part of the survival process. Or at least it became a part of the survival process at some stage. And since we know that we as humans are prone to making errors we have taken steps to doublecheck our beliefs to make sure that they are true (or at least that they map to reality).
 
>4) How do you as an atheist defend the fine-tuning argument? The chances of a world existing with life, even existing at all, is incredibly low. Did we really just get extremely lucky?
I personally dont defend the fine-tuning argument, I reject it for multiple reasons.
First of all, its proponents assume that the constants we see today could be different, but there is no real proof of that.
Second, even if they were indeed different that does not mean that life would be impossible. Life in the form as we know it may be impossible, but other forms could still arise.
http://web.uni-plovdiv.bg/marta/life_in_the_multiverse.pdf ignore the multiverse part, focus on the fact that even completely removing the weak nuclear force would still allow for the universe to form
 
>5) What do you think is the best argument against Christianity? Can you recommend any good literature that argues for atheism? I am not sure if Dawkins and Sam Harris books are any good or not. Looking for more honest/less biased writers.
Tough question.
For general overview of theistic arguments and why they all fail in one form or another I would recommend John Shook - The God Debates
For a bit more specific arguments against Christianity I would probably go for Loftus (although he can be a dick sometimes imo) Why I became an Atheist and The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. Loftus is a former preacher and apologiest so he has really good insight into Christianity. Think Matt Dillahunty, but this one writes books. And has a huge ego :P
I think there's a failure for many people to view religion anthropologically. Study the history of religions. Learn about religions in other places. You quickly realize there are as many religions out there as there are opinions.
The Christian Delusion has a great chapter about culture and Christianity:
http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689
I believe anthropology can also inform us on the subject of religion. Not just science alone.
Since you know about Richard Carrier I would assume you already have read some of the well known Anti-religionists like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennet, Stenger, etc. If you are talking about secular biblical scholarship and historical analysis there isn't anyone who keeps me interested as much as Carrier, but I haven't read much in that subject. Some others include Robert Price and Bart Erhman.
There are several good essay compilations by John Loftus which are more generally directed at Christianity. They include essays by Carrier and Robert Price and a number of other secular thinkers. The Christian Delusion I think is the first in that series. Hitchens's The Portable Atheist is another good collection which includes older writing aimed at all religion. Bertrand Russell is a great, too.
Eh, sorry, obviously keeping too many threads going in the old wetware.
Did you read my reddit post? Do you have any specific questions?
So far as I know, only myself and John Loftus have positied the problem in this form. I found his by someone linking to it on the Reddit post I made.
For the full treatment of his argument, you need to get his book The Christian Delusion. He states it simply on his blog.
I'm not sure if I could do a better job then I already did in my reddit post linked above, except at the time I made it I had not yet made the link between the story of "the fall" and god's blaming us for the suffering he himself in fact caused. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.
In short, God created in a method that maximized suffering for no apparent reason when he could have used special creation like he seemed to imply instead. He then misrepresents how he did it in book that is the only source of knowledge about him we have, and instead blamed our own sinfulness via "the fall" story for all the death and suffering. The ground is said to be cursed because of our sin, but in fact if evolution is true, it's the way God planned things and even created us.
No one has yet come up with an answer besides "God doesn't care about individuals", which is not something I hold compatible with a supposedly omnibenevolent god.
The OP and the book don’t talk about anything but Christianity - that does not exclude other gods. That’s a logical conclusion that is not present in this thread outside of your post.
Here’s a link to the book - it’s written by an atheist but it’s only focus is Christianity: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689/ref=nodl_
There are many people and religions that identify as Christian that believe in more than one god.
A tough view. The use of pop, and children's, culture icon cartoon figures, the distracting background noise, and the really slow presentation of actual information/argument make the first vid hard to watch and really dilutes any message. Though I did like the cameo from the Little Caesars Pizza-Pizza guy. From watching the first vid, there is no topic argument/position statement explicitly made/presented, though if I had to guess as to the final topic position/argument, based upon the way the very sparse information is presented, that an argument will be made that supports the listed or attributed authors of the various books of the NT - this is just a guess, the presentation of introductory material was really incoherent.
> "One of the things I have noticed about critics who say that this or that book in the NT is bogus is that they seldom seem to explain in any detail how we decide who wrote a document."
Say what? I smell a strawman argument.
The above quote was made whilst a slide show of books that discuss the New Testament was shown. Some of these books are recognizable as titles containing literary criticism of the New Testament, many are not. I could not get a good look at the "examples" presented as the screen time was very short (compared to the relatively long time given to worthless animations of smurfs or topic transition special effects), too short to get a good look at the sources that I assume supports the above statement was quoted; I had to do a frame by frame advance to see/read the titles presented.
Let's look at the first few "references" presented:
Just between the book title and lack of authorship identification, without even reading the book description, is enough for anyone discussing NT literary criticism to reject the book as a credible source.Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books. Nope.
A book containing the personal journey of one man losing Religious Faith. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Examines the documentary hypothesis and other possible sources of much of the narrative of the Bible. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Look, another Dan Baker book already. A book against the reasonableness and rationality of Christian belief. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Finally, a book that appears to have sections that may address the authorship of selected New Testament writings (I say appears as I have not read it and am relying upon the publisher description, the TOC, and reviews) - though the book appears to be more directed towards the content of the NT rather than attributed source critism.
Bummer. Out of the first 5 potential references which one would reasonably consider as being presented on the authorship of the NT (you know, the topic/vid title), none (0 for 5) of them seem to be a reference to literary criticism of the authorship of the New Testament books. And I wanted to use the very references presented above to refute the strawman argument presented in the above quote that books/references that perform a literary criticism of the NT authorship (or the Bible in general) "seldom seem to explain in any detail how we decide who wrote a document."
Let's look at a popular writer on the New Testament, Bart D. Ehrman. An example, Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. And look at that, Ehrman does indeed present extensive detail, on the how's of literary criticism and attributed authorship. Granted one example does not a strawman break, however, I have found that references literary criticism, Biblical or other, almost always include a review of the methods used.
The Christian Delusion edited by John Loftus is an excellent collection of essays coming from various points of view
Yes, that is totally what I meant ಠ_ಠ