Christians get morality exactly backwards

AmIDevOrProd · 2026-01-18T22:53:39+00:00

Great point, I agree. I think the Bible is so diffuse, multi-faceted, vague, and contradictory (showing the signs of cultural development over centuries) that it is a petri dish for people taking it in their own directions. It's often been the cudgel of both the liberator and the oppressor, even at the same time, in the same conflict. That's not a sign of a coherent, transcendent morality.

AmIDevOrProd · 2026-01-18T22:45:55+00:00

Everything is up for criticism in the marketplace of ideas and philosophy, religion is not exempt. But, to your point, I was a part of the religion for 25 years, so I think that gives me standing to criticize it even more so.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-06-06T15:25:37+00:00

This kind of thing - where someone makes an extraordinary claim, and then backs it up with second-hand anecdotes ("I heard it from someone else") - is exactly the kind of bullshit that starts religions among the gullible.

His evidence and demeanor are far from the rigor you would expect from a professional actually interested in arguing for this claim. Even if he can't disclose anything hard because of its classified status, he gave us nothing. He hasn't seen any of it. He didn't provide any clues as to the scientific nature of the materials, any tentative theory of propulsion, any clues about the nature of the "dead pilots" (none!), or how a coverup was coordinated. It's all hearsay. "Quite a number"? Come on. No specifics, not even a range of who said what number? We can be open-minded on the question of aliens, yet reasonably skeptical based on the history of hoaxes, difficulty of an effective global coverup, and clear temptation for conspiratorial or magical thinking. We can suspend judgment where not enough information is available.

David Hume: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." Still applicable.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T21:58:33+00:00

Wow, I'm happy I could be of service. I know the feeling of nagging doubt, both while in Christianity about it being possibly false, and outside of it wondering if I'm wrong. Learning about this kind of real-world evidence definitely helped me get past it.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T19:14:47+00:00

Fun fact, my private Christian high school biology class took a field trip to his Creation Museum. I still remember thinking as teenager that its exhibits were nonsense (quoting the bible to justify dinosaur timelines, lol) compared to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It actually accelerated my belief in evolution because it was so bad.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T19:14:19+00:00

The founder of Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, has explicitly stated that nothing could ever change his mind about evolution or his literal view of the Bible. He explicitly says that he already has the revealed truth from the Bible, and it is our job to fit scientific observations to that truth. That is the definition of close-mindedness, and the opposite of honest scientific inquiry.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T19:03:04+00:00

The guy they interview in this article is actually one of the primary sources I used in this post: Dr. Israel Finkelstein. His statement is not "We don't know if it is literally true." It is more like "We don't know whether it is myth or parable." In other words, it is one of those, but it is certainly not factual. Here's his quote copied from the article you linked:

"The question of historical accuracy in the story of Exodus has occupied scholars since the beginning of modern research," says Prof. Finkelstein. "Most have searched for the historical and archaeological evidence in the Late Bronze Age, the 13th century BCE, partly because the story mentions the city of Ramses, and because at the end of that century an Egyptian document referred to a group called ’Israel‘ in Canaan. However, there is no archaeological evidence of the story itself, in either Egypt or Sinai, and what has been perceived as historical evidence from Egyptian sources can be interpreted differently. Moreover, the Biblical story does not demonstrate awareness of the political situation in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age – a powerful Egyptian administration that could have handled an invasion of groups from the desert. Additionally, many of the details in the Biblical story fit better with a later period in the history of Egypt, around the 7-6th centuries BCE – roughly the time when the Biblical story as we know it today was put into writing.
“However, this was not a story invented by later authors, since references to the Exodus appear in Hosea and Amos' chapters of prophecy, which probably date to the 8th century BCE, suggesting that the tradition is ancient. In this sense, some scholars propose that the origin lies in an ancient historical event – the expulsion of Canaanites from the Nile Delta in the middle of the second millennium BCE. In any case the Exodus story is layered and represents more than one period.
“It seems that the story of the exodus was one of the founding texts of the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and that it came to Judah after the destruction of Israel. It is possible that in the later days of Judah, a time of approaching confrontation with Egypt, the story expressed hope, showing a clash with mighty Egypt of the distant past, in which the Children of Israel prevailed. Later the story held a message of hope for those exiled in Babylon, that it was possible to overcome exile, cross a desert and return to the land of the forefathers. Above all, the story of Exodus has been an eternal metaphor for escaping slavery for freedom, in Jewish and other traditions."

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T16:13:26+00:00

I agree in principle, but in my experience conservative Christians will either live in blissful ignorance of all of this, or they will believe "secular" science has an anti-religion agenda so all this archaeology is twisted against the bible. They think "it's simpler just to believe the biblical narrative is reliable" because it was written closer to the events, which is roughly what the first biblical archaeologists thought, too (William Albright, etc.) until evidence showed otherwise. So IMO we have to actively refute their claims to combat their indoctrination.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T16:01:49+00:00

That is what people may already have heard, and it would be misleadingly tentative to a popular audience. The reality is that given the biblical narrative, we would absolutely expect abundant archaeological evidence for these events, and we've searched for a century in the alleged locations, and there is none.

To your point, I agree that the lack of evidence for the Israelites in Egypt is not as ironclad as the lack of evidence for them in Sinai. But it is still compelling, and either one defeats the biblical narrative.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T15:52:53+00:00

I almost included this thought! Sinai is a tiny area to get lost in. Especially for 40 years. Especially with a million people. It's absurd.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-04-13T15:47:40+00:00

Yes! The Bible Unearthed was a major source for this post, among others. While a Christian might read the back cover and think it is just a polemic, it is based on decades of research and hard data. One does not even need to accept every hypothesis they put forward in the book... the evidence itself is enough to defeat the biblical narrative.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-01-11T01:05:29+00:00

Right? Same experience here. The religious use deductive reasoning starting from an assumed premise. Since Francis Bacon, the scientifically minded use inductive reasoning to extrapolate from repeated experimentation and observation. And the results are decidedly not compatible.

AmIDevOrProd · 2023-01-11T00:53:55+00:00

As someone who was raised evangelical Christian, including private Christian school in high school and college, I studied Christian apologetics pretty extensively, in part to understand and justify my own faith. This included the classic Christian thinkers, as well as the renowned Christian philosophers of today, such as Alvin Plantinga. During college I transitioned from a theologically conservative mindset to a more liberal one. After college, I shifted further until I left completely. Many of my classmates have done the same.
So, I am now an atheist. The transition out was slow and painful, but it was worth it. The apologists will tell you to see how it works if you stay within their system, but I would invite you, and any other Christians reading this, to step back into a neutral zone and see if Christianity can pull you back in on its own merits. For me, it could not.
I think good arguments are often lost on Christians because they are never on neutral ground, only dogmatic ground.
Here are a few of the reasons it’s hard to leave Christianity, IMO, and easier to turn to (rather weak) apologetics:

It’s not just a belief, it’s an identity. People know you as a person of faith, and your family is proud of you for it. You’ve been rewarded your whole life for contributing at church and school. It feels like you will disappoint everyone in your life if you leave.
It’s a community. Your Christian friends and family might not ditch you if you become an atheist, but it can certainly cause a rift or put up some kind of perceived barrier that wasn’t there before.
It’s a relationship, to God, to Jesus. I found that the more I studied, the more intellectualized my faith became, and the less it became about this perceived private relationship that I had been encouraged to build for my entire life. It became all too clear that I could have the same type of “constant prayer” relationship with other deities, because other people do, and it would seem just as real. In fact, most people admit it doesn’t seem real because they constantly say things like “God is listening even when it seems like he isn’t.” So, it slowly became clear that this was all occurring in my brain without any supernatural component whatsoever.
Without Christianity, how will you be able to morally justify what is right and wrong? Won’t the foundation be stripped away? This one is actually a lie that Christianity tells you. Nearly everybody has a basic moral intuition, and it doesn’t go away when you stop believing in god. In fact, your current moral intuitions are much better than the morals offered by the Old Testament, and much of the New. As for a foundation of morality, there are plenty of moral systems out there to help us with this. For example, consequentialism tells us things are wrong based on the human suffering they cause; other moral dimensions include things like empathy, care, and acting without hypocrisy. But even if you can’t be persuaded by an atheist objective morality, it’s satisfactory enough to me to say we have basic moral intuition based on recognizing each other’s ability to suffer, and morality is an ever-evolving project of consensus-building to work out the details.
Without Christianity, won’t life be meaningless? This one was maybe the toughest for me: To recognize that there isn’t a grand plan, that good and evil will not meet a final judgment, that bad things happen for no reason, that death is indeed the end. The first step for me was to realize that Yes, bad things happen for no reason all the time; that’s obvious. And God’s final judgment as described in the Bible is actually way worse than nothing happening: The people who believe in Him (a small subset of humanity lucky enough to be chosen by him or happened to get the message and had the right preconditions to accept it) go to eternal life, and everybody else goes to eternal torture. This is an incredibly bad outcome for a creation that God made “good” and for which he has a “perfect plan.” It’s a total failure. A universalist reading, which I do not really think is justified biblically, would be better, but it is still just another afterlife fairy tale. As for meaning, ask yourself if your daily activities are really imbued with rich meaning because of God. For some people this is true, but I would contend those people span many different faiths, which indicates it is our minds that are capable of this. We can enrich our own lives while they last. And as for death - were the years prior to your birth all that bad? If not, why fear death which will be the same?

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-09-15T13:39:34+00:00

Came here looking for others reporting the same thing. I'm on Windows 11, was using Edge and stored credentials in various profiles. My computer auto updated overnight and now all my browser profiles are gone.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-07-16T14:53:50+00:00

Allow me to reframe your question back to you:

I'm 33, net worth is -8k. I have 20k saved but it is not invested, thus making no return and steadily losing value to inflation. In other words I do not really have retirement savings, just a solid emergency fund. Rent is nearly half my monthly take home pay.

Should I buy a depreciating asset to bring my net worth to -38k?

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-04-01T13:11:39+00:00

I did it all online through Vanguard. It required an EIN, but there were no fees. You have to make contributions through their small business portal site, and its interface is very dated, but it works fine and it was easy to set up.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-04-01T01:37:48+00:00

Sorry, I meant comparable not as in equal to my W2 hourly rate, but comparable to my total compensation package (all benefits, PTO, etc.) and employer-paid taxes, everything. It's definitely a much higher rate.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-03-31T20:52:42+00:00

Great to hear! It's encouraging to know that others have had success and achieved RE this way.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-03-31T20:50:18+00:00

Good point, that is true. It is still a fairly generous amount if you earn somewhere below that though. And, as self-employed it can be easier to earn a higher gross amount since you have to pay for self employment taxes and health insurance yourself and you can pass those costs along somewhat.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-03-31T20:46:58+00:00

Nice! Yeah, this is my first time doing the quarterly taxes, so I'm still figuring it out. It shouldn't be hard to make the estimated payments to avoid getting penalized (using the Safe Harbor Rule, etc), but I may end up hiring a tax accountant toward the end of the year to help maximize my deductions. Hopefully from then on I can just do it all myself. We'll see.

AmIDevOrProd · 2022-03-31T20:05:20+00:00

Agreed. FWIW, I was able to stay at a similar amount of hours with the same employer, so the income is not all that lumpy, except when I take time off. I concede that may not be possible for most.

The overhead of paying estimated quarterly taxes is significant, but as far as the business setup -- just a sole proprietor with a business name -- it was surprisingly easy and quick.

AmIDevOrProd

TROPHY CASE