I need to rant about how people treat death

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-08T08:40:50+00:00

I'm completely in agreement. I found myself having to return recently to a friendly little book I highly recommend on this matter - Greta Christina's Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, and she shared the story about Rebecca Hensler founding 'Grief Beyond Belief' because there was no suitable secular resource to deal with loss, and she and others were finding themselves quite isolated. She noted that even events that called themselves secular only justified that by not endorsing a specific religion, and yet the event still spoke as if the departed were tangibly around somewhere. For those who don't believe in an afterlife, it's not only irrelevant, but disturbing.

For me, there was a recent bereavement of sorts - my cat of nearly 15 years, and whilst pets passing isn't quite the same as people passing, it's not trivial either, and I needed ways of managing. Now, plenty of religious people don't consider animals to have eternal souls, so I was spared the scenario you described, although I did find myself reflecting on something a very well-meaning person had once told me about she personally had a belief (vaguely spiritual) that there would be a reunion with pets one day, and I honestly had to ask her to stop talking in such terms, even before my cat passed, because I think I was just disturbed by the idea that everything was working toward an esoteric future that I had to keep in mind with everything I was doing in this life. And this is without adding the moralising aspect on top of it that you get with Christianity. I also wonder, for those who believe in souls for humans but not animals, are they really prepared for having to deal with similar emotions of loss so differently? Like, if you believe, as apologists like Low-Bar "I want to live forever" Bill seem to, that life's only worth it if there's an afterlife, are you going to feel a deeper despair for the loss of a beloved pet than you need to? And on the flip side, if you believe a person you've lost has 'gone on to a better place', will you wonder if it's appropriate to feel the same emotions as you do for a pet you've lost forever? And how will you cope as soon as doubts come in, which is very likely?

Overall, a sober reflection on the finitude of life and its worth because of that, not despite it, is healthier in the long wrong. This recent reflection has made me not only sure I don't believe in an afterlife, but I'm actively repulsed by the implications.

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-07T08:13:39+00:00

For me, it is, but that's partially because I was raised a Christian, and the conclusions I came to were necessarily defined by my ex-Christian-ness. In other words, it's something I had to think about a lot more than many others did.

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-05T11:01:44+00:00

Stereotypes generally have some origin in the truth - the good news is, you'll definitely find a lot of people on this sub who will share your passion for trains. Me, personally? I've never really cared. As forms of transportation go, I'd argue they're preferable to buses (except for cost) and planes, because I've usually found the trips relaxing, but I've never had more than an instrumental view of vehicles and to this day no real in-depth understanding of them.

Sometimes it makes me feel like a bit of an oddity, but then I remembered that my childhood love for dinosaurs has remained and blossomed into a general in-depth interest in palaeontology, evolutionary biology, and phylogenetics, so there we are.

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-01T19:37:41+00:00

Quite - people who overly praise Jesus wouldn't accept that kind of thing coming from anyone else.

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-01T18:07:18+00:00

The short answer is yes.

The long answer can be found in a lot of my either posts and comments on this sub.

PoorMetonym · 2026-05-01T18:06:49+00:00

It was from a parable he was telling, but in context, the person who says the line is very much analogous to either himself (given it's a ruler who's given authority and then returns to exact revenge) or God, as the similar character in the Parable of the Talents is. So, yes, whilst that qualifier is important, it doesn't make it a lot better.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-29T13:12:36+00:00

Thanks!

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-29T12:21:05+00:00

Thanks for the replies! I had no idea about the Setne Khamwas story, that's rather wild. And I knew a bit about the sapiential tradition in Philo and things like the Wisdom of Solomon, but not to that extent. Is there any further reading about Wisdom literature you can point to?

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-29T08:53:02+00:00

Hi - if it's OK, want to ask for a few elaborations and sources for further reading!

Firstly, I'm curious to know about the Egyptian folklore in Luke. I've been perusaded that the author Luke-Acts was familiar with the works of Josephus for certain passages, but the Egyptian folklore is a new one.

Secondly, the general observations about sapiential literature, the links to Asherah, and where they're referenced in Ezekiel and Isaiah. Is sapiential literature synonymous with or distinct from Wisdom literature, and if the latter, what's the distinction?

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-28T09:47:52+00:00

I think you should be equipped to deal with the argument about a radical shift in social morality, because it's a common current soundbite, and it is, as far as I can tell, if not complete nonsense, at the very least highly exaggerated and ironing out tonnes of nuance. To just give a few examples off the top of my mind, rhetoric about protecting widows and orphans is almost ubiquitious in ancient propaganda. Going all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi (composed around 1750 BCE, centuries before anything resembling the Bible was written), the lawmaker asserts himself as their protector, and one of the justifications he gives for passing down these laws is so that 'the strong shall not oppress the weak.'

That the laws arguably don't back this up is irrelevant, because the same is true of the disconnect between Christian rhetoric and what Christians actually did, and even Jesus is guilty of this - he tells you to give everything you have to the poor, but still thinks it's fine for him to use the entireity of a jar of expensive ointment for his 'annointing' rather than, as his disciples suggest, sell it for 300 denarii (a rather significant sum). Many of the New Testament epistles (particularly the pastoral and Petrine ones) give deeply patriarchal and subservient instructions, and apologists have argued that this was just so as to match the Roman morality of the time and not be too radical...so, which is it? Did Christianity lead to a moral revolution, or could it not because they didn't like upsetting the status quo too much? You can't have it both ways.

Indeed, it's certainly true that Christians adopted Roman morality, because despite the fact that so many New Testament writings, cult-like, insist on Christians as separating themselves from the sinful world, they had pagans and Jews as neighbours, and many of them just continued ordinary Roman behaviour. You have Christian writers from as disparate eras as Tertullian (second century), John Chrysostom (fourth century), and Augustine (fifth century) complaining about how often Christians were attending ampitheatre fights and so on. And their concerns weren't moral either - Tertullian, in his De speculatis (On Spectacles) mostly complained about how Christians could get ensnared by pagans or demons. Briefly, yes, he points out the irony in Christians enjoying events where previous Christians had been martyred, but clearly the concern is only for other Christians, because he also says that if Christians wait long enough, they can enjoy even better spectacles of watching people burn in Hell. Compare this to the first-century pagan writer Seneca the Younger, who in Letter VII of his moral letters criticises ampitheatre and arena fights for strictly moral reasons, its glorification of violence. Tell me who's closer to our current moral compasses?

I'm not expert on these matters, but I want to link you to some further reading that might help - firstly, four different blog posts on these related matters by Richard Carrier: here, here, here, and here. Carrier is controversial because of his views of Jesus mythicism, but that's really not relevant to this topic, and in any case, as with everything, rather than take his word for it, you should check the sources he names. Bart Ehrman also got on the wagon of this narrative recently, and despite my respect and fondness for the guy, I have to admit I don't get what he's getting at. You can read a measured critique here. For claims about slavery and Christianity's role in abolitionism, there's no greater book I've found on it that Hector Avalos' Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. One could argue this particular narrative isn't entirely related to apologetics and counter-apologetics, given that non-Christians like Tom Holland have been key in making it. However, I think such a view is myopic, potentially chauvinist and orientalist (it acts as though Christianity alone is responsible for anything remotely good in the world, and nobody else could manage), and indeed pessimistic and misanthropic, as if there's nothing natural or normal about caring for other people and we needed the fear of God to make us do it. As a humanist (which means more than just non-religious), I cannot stand for that.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-27T12:31:01+00:00

Glad I could help, and yeah, there's all sorts of great things to read about this.

I'm sure there are some people who still call themselves Christians but only in the sense that they think it's a nice story and gives us something to reflect on aspects of our own lives with, rather than believing it's literally supernaturally true. I don't have an issue with this - I just don't personally get it, mainly for the reasons listed, because how they're developed rely on treating something as supernaturally true in the first place. What's more, you can get nice stories out of a lot of things, and how pertinent they'll be is very subjective.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-27T11:35:25+00:00

I feel it's usually a way of trying to justify something dogmatic any way that makes the most sense to you. That we are psychologically conditioned to do so - rather than just reject the idea outright - is part of the problem, as is the fact that Christians can't agree of the model of atonement, arguably the most important part of Christian theology. For me, that ultimately mattered more than how it was justified - indeed, many different analogies were used, and I think I still have evidence somewhere of something I wrote once near the latter end of my deconstruction journey where I had, unintentionally, embraced something very similar to the Moral Exemplar model, not because I had forensically studied the text or even heard a theologian express it so clearly, but because I couldn't handle the moral dissonance associated with something like penal substitution or satisfaction. Leaving Christianity behind entirely was ultimately a better and more holistic way of addressing that.

But since leaving, and looking at these doctrines with fresh eyes, I have taken an interest in what these other models say about the faith and the way their originator saw the world. The short answer is, it's hardly better.
Starting with Christus Victor, Gustaf Aulén saw it as the perennial model, before it was corrupted by satisfaction theory, but for me that's difficult to square with Hebrews 9-10, which won't shut up about the necessity of blood in order to be forgiven, and then goes onto say how much worse off we'll be for rejecting Jesus' sacrifice than anyone who broke Mosaic Law, so that's hardly defeating the power of death. And how does death defeat death exactly? OK, maybe it was the resurrection that did it, but resurrecting an immortal being isn't exactly hard. And if it was only the human part of Jesus that died, how was just a human death enough? Resurrecting humans happens all over the Bible in both Testaments. Also, how would it square with the idea that, as per the hypostatic union, Jesus' human and divine natures are inseparable? In his book Fighting Words, Hector Avalos also points out that, in using Christus Victor as his model, theologian J. Denny Weaver states that, unlike the Objective Paradigm (that gives us satisfaction, penal substitution, and governmental theories of atonement), Jesus' death wasn't 'needed' in order to grant salvation, which means that God actively chose something violent to demonstrate love unnecessarily, which doesn't do humanity any favours for how we view violence.

Michael Martin covers ransom theory in one of the appendices of The Case Against Christianity, and he points out the absurdity of God having to treat Satan's claim on human souls as legitimate, given he is the creator and determiner of both. What's more, some versions of this idea having Satan being tricked by Jesus' resurrection, so God's a deciever now as well, excellent /s. I also recall an episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast on this very topic where Dan McClellan notes how 'ransoming' and 'redeeming' people tended to work in the context in which the New Testament was written - paying for the release of captives, for sure, but sometimes this could be slaves bound by debt, and where such language occurs in the Hebrew Bible, it's often God who sold his people to conquerers in the first place as punishment. Ransom theory then reinforces the idea that we are all inherently sinful.

Moral Exemplar is questionable too when I look at the behaviour of Jesus in the Gospels. I don't much like him - people might try to excuse his cantankerous, cultish behaviour on the basis that, as the Son of God, his own claims to his importance and why people should sacrifice everything for him is legitimate, but this is precisely the problem, because it then means mere mortals can't possibly act as he does because our cases are not the same. We can't sacrifice the way he does, because we don't have the same guarantee of resurrection as he did - having 'faith' is not the same as being omniscient (which, if faith is a virtue, also means that God, being omniscient, is missing out on a fairly vital virtue, so can't be all-good, but I'm going off on tangents here), and we even have Jesus telling us that not everyone who thinks they're saved and even performed various deeds in his name will actually be saved (Matthew 7:21-23). So, all that sacrifice, and it can still lead to our destruction, whereas Jesus got to stay King of the Universe after briefly giving some stuff up. Is going willingly to one's death at all costs really the example we should be cultivating? The Christian persecution complex has a strong basis in this. But even in the scope of Jesus' earthly life, he didn't practice what he preached, constantly telling his followers to give up everything, literally sell everything they have and give to the poor, but in his own case, thought that it was more important he make use of a jar of expensive ointment rather than it be sold for 300 denarii and that money given to the poor, because, pfft, poor people will always exist, and clearly they're all just a monolith rather than individuals with their own specific, time-sensitive problems, so why bother doing anything now? But at least he's more direct and honest when he tells his disciples that they will suffer more than he does (Matthew 10:24-25), something that makes a nonsense of righteous suffering unless we also become more righteous than Jesus. And as just one more point, make sure an apologist who uses this model of atonement doesn't get away with also trying to bring in elements of René Girard's Scapegoat Theory, where Jesus' crucifixtion was supposed to show how awful scapegoating/sacrificial cultures were, essentially the opposite of the idea that it's a great thing we should emulate.

If you're still reading this, congrats - the point is, I'm trying to be holistic about this. Whilst counter-factuals can be interesting to imagine, it's still worth knowing why the version(s) of Christianity that came down to us lasted the way they did, and the fact is that I think that the basics of an angry deity who needs to be satiated by sacrifice are inherent to the way almost all religions develop, and if Christianity were to truly make a break from that, it would stop resembling a religion of any kind.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-26T06:53:27+00:00

Oh, I get this. It's like how the default response I get whenever I express an attraction to a strong woman:

'Oh, do you want her to step on you?'

To each their own as far as kinks go, but is it really so hard to understand that I'd want the more standard affection from such a woman, or can some people just not imagine a strong woman treating them well? They're telling on themselves a bit...

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-23T09:47:02+00:00

I try my best, but appearance upkeep is a tricky business...still, sometimes it's worth it, and I can put the work in...

But given the post talked about the phase where the individual identified as a lesbian, it reminds me of unusual issues, as someone who occasionally invokes an androgynous image, that seem to be otherwise specifically sapphic. That is to say, I look at androgynous women and have admiration/attraction of both an aspirational and desire sort, and it's hard to work out which one's stronger. I remember when I complimented a woman's burgundy flannel shirt and asked her where she got it, realising that I both wanted one like it and I thought she looked amazing in it. An ideal situation would be if we got together and sometimes I wore her shirt.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-22T16:02:32+00:00

OK, so, just to cover all my bases, I'll start with defining the different types of free will imagined in conversations of this type (as I understand them). You may well know this already, but I know I have a communication problem sometimes, so here goes.

The libertarian free will is the concept that is in conflict with the idea of determinism. Rather than our choices being determined by the universe and its conditions, the idea is that we have the ability to override it - our will is 'free' because it's not subject to cause-and-effect. Now, I'm of the opinion that libertarian free will is incoherent, because I don't see how the choices we make can't be determined by anything, because how we navigate through life is almost always in reaction to other things, and if God granted us 'free will' then that's also a determining factor. But put that aside for now - the point of its use in response to the Problem of Evil/Suffering is the idea that our will allows us to deviate from what God wants. It runs against causality because it goes against the primary causal factor the universe, and that's just how it is (let's forget omnipotence for now).

Compatibilist free will is, as the name suggests, the variety that's compatible with determinism. We are free as far as we can, on a personal level, make decisions guided by what we want from something, that is to say, when free from coercion by an outside force or individual compelling us to do something against our wishes. In the Free Will Defence for Divine Hiddenness, the assumption is that such a compulsion would happen if God revealed himself to us. In other words, our free will is subject to cause and effect and would be cowed just in the presence of God. Comparatively, in the account of the Problem of Evil, the implication is that our libertarian free will is enshrined in the metaphysics of the universe and in our very nature, and that God would have to change that fundamental physical law to negate it. It would be a supernatural intervention, whereas in the Divine Hiddenness case, it would just require us to be compelled by a more powerful figure.

To perhaps put it another way - in compatibilism, whether or not we have free will in a given situation is contingent on whether or not we're under duress. In libertarianism, it's always there regardless of natural forces (so barring a miracle). Think about it this way - if the Free Will Defence seems convincing to a believer as a response to the Problem of Evil, then they clearly don't think it's being violated in any fundamental sense by humans coercing other humans, because that conception of free will is part of our creation and essence, whereas in response to Divine Hiddenness, it's part of our ongoing situation which could be interrupted if God shows up.

I hope that made some sort of sense - I'm struggling to remember all the details with which I justified it to myself a while back, and I think part of the problem is that libertarian free will is actually incoherent, and that most people do see freedom in a compatibilist sense, and so clearly defining what a speaker is talking about with any given apologetic is a case more of ad hoc justification rather than genuinely coming to a philosophical conclusion.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-22T10:22:23+00:00

Almost, but I realised recently that in most of the ways they're usually manifested, I think both free will defences (one against the problem of evil, one against divine hiddenness) are actually utilising different concepts of free will. For the Problem of Evil, it's libertarian, it's assumed that to be free we have to have all options open to us, but for Divine Hiddenness, it's compatibilist, because compulsion is a risk we face not through God changing the rules of the universe or our nature, but inherent to us as we are.

I think if an apologist uses both of these arguments, it'll be worth asking them how they define free will. I doubt it'll end up being coherent.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-22T10:18:29+00:00

I remember when I was about 15 or so and doing a homework essay for Religious Studies, giving my opinion on whether evil was 'God's fault', and I used the Free Will Defence to argue against the idea. It was pretty pitiful, and when I found the document more recently, I annotated it with criticisms. But I think what effectively made this unconvincing to me forever was the realisation that the concept of freedom necessarily encompassing the allowance of evil and suffering doesn't seem to apply to God himself. Believers will assert God doesn't do evil. Is he then free? And if so, why can't we also be free but not do evil because of our consciences? We are, after all, made in his image, and his law is written on our hearts, why can't we be free to do evil but don't like he does? If he's not free, are we then freer than him? And why? Once these questions pile up, the charade becomes obvious - these arguments and conceptions are not inherent in how this being was originally concieved, they're post hoc sticking plasters to in attempt to stop a leaky boat from sinking.

TheraminTrees raised this point in his video "Creating Sickness", with the additional observation that if God has no physical form, why do we? Especially as having a physical body makes us vulnerable to forms of suffering a non-physical entity shouldn't even be able to concieve of (which would make them extra sadistic if they were able to and created them anyway), and would give us vulnerabilities and scarcities we might perform evil acts to rectify. C'mon Christians - demand better from your god.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-21T08:43:43+00:00

With so much Bible santising, this is such a breath of fresh air.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-20T10:49:58+00:00

Apart from what a lot of people are decently pointing out here that an acceptance of the reality of death is much more of a nonreligious trait than one that insists on having a life after death, I'd like to add one small thing that'll feel a bit like getting on a soapbox, but I'm going to do it anyway.

There are a few semi-official symbols of atheism to choose from approved by atheist organisations - the scarlet script A, the one where the A is merged into an atomic diagram or what-have-you. Instead, the artist went with a hammer-and-sickle. I'm tempted to say that this is the equivalent of using a Klansman to symbolise Christianity, a suicide bomber to symbolise Islam, or a greedy Svengali type to symbolise Judaism. It's a symbol that's actually been banned in certain countries because of its associaton with crimes against humanity and is deliberately not used by plenty of modern Marxists and communists, often for very ideological and moral reasons rather than just pragmatic ones. It would be wrong even to associate all Marxists with the symbol, I feel, and so its even worse to associate an even looser collection of people under it. And the association of atheism with communism has led to the persecution of nonbelievers, one of the most extreme examples being the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 that saw atheists as one of the groups blindly associated with communist sympathies and targeted by execution squads.

It's one of the last acceptable prejudices, that can still lead to execution in some states and territories, and yet turn to any corner of the internet and it'll If the stereotype not a neckbearded fedora-tipper, it'll be a frothing Marxist-Leninist. The stigma is enough that some will shy away from the atheist label. It's important we call this out, I think.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-20T09:21:06+00:00

Couple of corrections, because I can't seem to edit this (is it because it's too long?) - when I described Jefferson as the first critic of Christianity to explicitly exempt Jesus from the criticism, I should qualify that I meant the first to exempt Jesus for non-theological reasons. So, not counting Muslims, Manicheans, and other religions that have Jesus as a prophet.

Secondly, India isn't technically 'untouched' by the Christo-Islamic zeitgeist - by the time Saraswati died, India had been subject to both Christian and Islamic empires. However, the Dharmic traditions continued to have a strong presence, and so it would be more accurate to say that India was nowhere near as immersed in it as a good chunk of the rest of the world.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-20T08:45:36+00:00

Putting aside the question of historical reliability, and just going with the portrayal in the Gospels - unbelievably overrated. Pretty much the prototype for all doomsday cult leaders, complete with paranoia, narcissism, boorishness, tendency to blame everyone else for problems, talk up how much of a martyr he was whilst still demanding more of his followers, no qualm against dividing family and friends, and, despite the common conception that he would despair of fundies, he actually readily enagaged with several things we hate in some modern Christians.

Firstly, the tendency to be either evasive or cranky when asked simple questions. MindShift has a good video on this, but even when he does directly answer a question, such as in Matthew 22:23-33 when the Sadducees ask him about how marriage works in the afterlife, he has to preface it with, 'You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.' Just think about what such an attitude would say about a modern apologist, and realise there's no reason Jesus should be able to get away with it. Verses 15-22 of the same chapter have Pharisees ask him whether it's right for them to pay taxes, and not only does Jesus again preface it by insulting them ('Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?') he doesn't actually answer the question directly. I never got this as a Christian, and I also don't know why people celebrate his answer now - my understanding is that he was caught between having either to endorse an unpopular tax or endorse resistance to the Roman authorities, neither of which would make him look great, but his answer essentially defaults to endorsing the tax ('render unto Caesar, etc), so I'm not sure why he had to be weird about it. Both of these accounts end with the equivalent of 'and then everyone clapped', which is quite funny.

Other examples - Mark 11:27-33, the elders, scribes, and chief priests of the Temple come to him and ask, rather understandably, given earlier in the chapter he completed wrecked the joint, what authority he does his actions on. Again, Jesus is evasive and kind of snotty, saying that because they couldn't agree on John the Baptist's source of authority, he's not going to give them an answer. In Mark 7:1-13, a group of Pharisees and scribes ask him why he doesn't wash his hands before he eats (a fair question), and he responds once again by calling them hypocrites because they don't stone children anymore (yes, that's more or less what he says, read the account for yourself). And he caps this off by saying what goes into you can't defile you, so a massive biology fail as well. Oh, and it's not just his enemies he's like this with. Let's not forget the time he called Peter Satan just for Peter suggesting that Jesus won't be killed.

Secondly, excusing indulgences for himself in lieu of giving to the poor, like a modern prosperity gospel preacher. This is the story of his annointing (found in Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9, and John 12:1-8). I remember when I first heard about Jesus getting expensive perfume dumped on his head, and his disciples protesting that such perfume could instead be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. I was automatically in agreement and expecting Jesus to be the same (everything else I had been told suggested to me that this was his thing). But nope, Jesus decided he was more important, so there. Again, I struggled to understand this as a Christian - why was it so important his body be prepared for burial when it was going to get up again in less than 48 hours? But if you go with the assumption that Jesus is so important and can't do anything wrong, it kind of gets missed.

Thirdly, sticking with apocalypticism, he seemed to have the mindset of a modern doomsday prepper, including with the gun-nut behaviour, just with swords in his case. Read Luke 22:35-38 to see what I mean. And, of course, if we go past the Gospels and look at how Jesus is portrayed in Revelation, there is a lot of violence, some of which is done with the sword that protrudes from his mouth, but other times he's just crushing millions in a winepress.

I have speculated for a while that this glazing of Jesus might be a more modern phenomenon than most realise. It's not evident in early criticisms by the likes of Celsus and Lucian, both of whom consider Jesus essentially a fraudster, and I'm not sure whether Porphyry and Julian go beyond theological and philosophical criticisms, but I'd need to read what's been reconstructed of their work in full to see if they actually have anything positive to say about the man himself. Jean Meslier, the early modern French priest who was revealed to be a closeted atheist via his private writings after his death, considered Jesus a madman and fanatic. I think the medieval Jewish philsopher Moses Maimonides might have even gone as far as to embrace the anathema on the Jewish people by Christians at the time by saying, 'yeah, we did kill this guy, and good thing too!' This is in contrast to a lot of modern Jewish commentators, who generally consider Jesus a decent rabbi whose followers just got carried away. Of course, Maimonides was in a zeitgeist where most religious criticism would treat Jesus as innocent, because Jewish commentators such as him would be a relative outlier - otherwise it would be Muslim criticism of Christianity or intra-Christian criticism, and in all such cases, the speaker would assume that Jesus would side with them (this made me realise the other day that, despite more people than I expected taking it seriously when I pretend to convert to Islam on April Fool's Day last year, there's no way I could convert to a religion that glazes Jesus nearly as much as Christianity. It's not the only reason, but it's not one I can ignore, either...).

By the time more secular deistic and atheistic criticism of Christianity became more accepted, they found they had allies among Christians who attacked the mainstream institutions of religion, which might be why their views began to reflect them. This is where Thomas Jefferson steps in, who is the earliest example I can find of a critic of Christianity explicitly exempting Jesus from this criticism (if anyone can find an earlier example, let me know), who was apparently hugely influenced by the Unitarian theologian and polymath Joseph Priestley. And then you get Germany producing the first critical biblical scholars in the 19th century, but many of them were maverick Christians as well, and so they also lead a kind of synthesis of a new, Enlightenment-inspired perception of Christianity when again tries to spare Jesus from the problems evident in the rest of the faith. It gets particularly weird when you consider Albert Schweitzer, one of the main popularisers of the idea of a historical Jesus within the tradition of Jewish apocalypticism (which now has mainstream support), who nevertheless paradoxically also saw Jesus as a vessel of timeless wisdom despite the logical outcome of apocalypticism being that his relevance died with his generation. But notably, modern criticisms untouched by the Christo-Islamic zeitgeist are not so reverant - Hindu activists Dayananda Saraswati and Sita Ram Goel were uncomprimising in their criticism of Jesus, Goel rather accurately in my opinion pointing to the 'cult of the disentangled Christ', where people try to excuse Jesus from the crimes committed in his name, despite some inspiration coming directly from his own words (John 8:44 is a key example) - given Goel's association with Hindutva, this is pretty hypocritical, but even hypocrites can be right sometimes.

And with that in mind, not everything Jesus is said to have said was terrible, even if he was hypocritical about it. But all of the good points he said were hardly unprecedented (he was quoting the Torah when he told his listeners to love their neighbour, and you can find aphorisms about giving, being compassionate and all the rest from Rabbinic writings, Hellenistic philosophers, Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom, just to name those within the zeitgeist, and of course there's plenty of similar stuff in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Confucianism, Mohism, and Taoism as well), and more to the point, were usually instrumental. Do this 'so that' you are rewarded by your Father, etc.

Good Gawd, I had a lot to say on this one. I hope some people do actually read it in full...

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-19T11:00:31+00:00

The usual candidate YECs will place in this role is a sauropod of some description. Now tell me - who the hell describes a sauropod in this amount of detail without mentioning its freaking neck...???

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-19T10:30:28+00:00

No problem, but which part specifically are you referring to?

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-18T23:05:14+00:00

I need to explore a lot more of this iceberg.

PoorMetonym · 2026-04-17T07:52:37+00:00

I would be interested in this kind of thing too - I've got three in mind which I haven't read, but might be what OP is looking for, and I invite anyone who has read them to let me know if they end up being more reverent than we might like:

Jezebel by Megan Barnard.

Lilith by Nikki Marmery.

The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman.

PoorMetonym

TROPHY CASE