Did Edward Gibbon blame Christianity for the decline of the Roman Empire?

I have now finally read Edward Gibbon's classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although certainly opinionated in a way that one might not consider up to the standards of historical research today, it is considered to be a ground-breaking work for its time (1776-1788) in the way that it used primary sources to tell its story.

But the most important reason I became interested in it is the pejorative way in which Gibbon is referred to in critiques of New Atheism. There is a general impression that Gibbon laid the blame for the collapse of the Roman Empire and the loss of its technology and learning at the feet of Christianity. In some circles, "Gibbonian fantasy" or "Gibbonian fiction" seems to be a short-hand for the belief that Christianity is singularly responsible for retarding scientific progress and causing the Dark Ages.

Having now read the book I have absolutely no idea where this is coming from. Maybe this idea is more clearly developed in some other work by the same author, but in the Decline and Fall I search for it in vain.

Don't get me wrong - it is clear that Gibbon had no love for Christianity. He argued in at least two sections of his book that early Christianity was more intolerant than the paganism that preceded it, and that Christianity wasted resources on piety that could have been better used for other, more practical purposes. (Nobody can seriously doubt the first claim, but the second seems a bit silly. Wasting resources on piety is not a Christian characteristic, it is a religious one; every pagan priest offering sacrifices to the gods and every Vestal Virgin performing a pointless ceremony could have more been more productively employed as an engineer, scholar, teacher, navigator, trader, or a variety of other professions.)

Due to his visible aversion to religion it is unsurprising that Christian apologists don't like Gibbon and want to cast aspersions on his work. But that does not mean that he actually made the argument that Christianity brought down the Roman empire and destroyed ancient learning. I really don't see where he did.

Even the Wikipedia page on the book as of today 20 June 2020 quotes a section that makes clear that despite Gibbon's dislike of Christianity he did not see it as a decisive factor: "if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic" - in other words, the same decline would have taken place without Christianisation.

To any open-minded reader of his book it should become clear that his main culprit is an institutional process that can perhaps be usefully summarised as follows:

(1) As the republic expanded, the military was professionalised to increase its efficiency and flexibility of operation. What used to be a citizen army made up of free men expected to serve to defend the republic turned into an army of professional soldiers rewarded with property after a period of service.

(2) One of the consequences was that the average Roman citizen did not need, and ultimately did not want, to risk his life fighting to defend the republic. As the republic became an empire and grew even further, more and more of the armed forces were recruited from non-citizens, increasingly barbarian mercenaries or foederati, foreign tribes bribed to defend the empire from other, closely related tribes. It should be immediately obvious that these kinds of soldiers have considerably less loyalty to Rome than Roman citizen soldiers, and that mercenaries are only useful to you as long as you can guarantee their pay and nobody out-bids you. That alone could have been the empire's death knell, but...

(3) In addition, the empire had a severe institutional weakness in that there was never a clear rule of succession. There were phases where the next emperor was the previous emperor's son, whatever his ability, and others where the previous emperor would adopt a successor to ensure that the empire would be left in competent hands. But what if the emperor was a tyrant and got assassinated, with either no successor in place or his plan for succession as discredited as he was? Although technically an emperor needed to be recognised by the senate, imperator was a military title, and at any rate having control of a lot of swords is more of a, shall we say, practical argument than being endorsed by a bunch of elderly guys in togas. In practice the senate did not want those swords to be turned against themselves. It thus happened more and more that the next emperor was selected by the army and merely ratified by the senate. This again had two important consequences.

(4) First, the way for an ambitious officer to be elected emperor by the army was obviously to promise his fellow mercenaries a lot of money. In several parts of his book Gibbon is quite explicit about this tendency: the constant need to bribe the army to either get elected or to tolerate an emperor that the soldiers had not elected themselves drained the tax payers. Gibbon claims it also weakened the military vigour of the soldiers, who were at times living the good life spending their bribes while neglecting their training and insisting they shouldn't have to carry heavy armour.

(5) Second, frequently different parts of the army would elect different officers to be the new emperor. If both of them felt strong enough to give it a serious try, the empire would immediately be plunged into another short civil war. Just to decide whether the guy nominated by the Gaulish legions or the guy nominated by the Syrian legions gets to be the new ruler, they wasted the lives of thousands of soldiers who might more productively have been used to keep barbarian invaders or the Sassanian empire at bay.

So there we have it: the two key problems were the decreasing loyalty and increasing corruption of the armed forces and the institutional weakness of the republic. And both of them were probably entirely unavoidable. You cannot conquer and control an empire with an army made up of free farmers who have to travel back to northern Italy to bring in the harvest just when the enemy attacks in Mesopotamia, so you need a professional army. And even if you have very nice institutional arrangements they won't be of any use against a large army that has no loyalty to those institutions. The only alternative would have been not to have an empire in the first place.

I am not a historian. I do not know if this is accurate in all details. I do not know if this is really why the Roman empire declined, and I understand at least that plagues may have been another factor. The point is: this is Gibbon's argument, not that Christianity caused the decline.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 2

In his second lecture, James defines what he would 'religion' consider to be for the purposes of the lecture series.

He stresses right at the beginning that religion is such a complex phenomenon that anybody who thinks they can come up with a clear and simple definition is fooling themselves. He then mentions two aspects, the organisational structure (the church with its office holders and buildings) and the personal beliefs and feelings of each believer, and he excludes the former from consideration to focus his efforts on the latter.

That is unsurprising, given his psychological approach, and fair enough. A historian would perhaps be most comfortable addressing religion as an organised body while excluding personal psychology from their considerations. What I find interesting to observe, however, is that one aspect of religion as I see it is not even mentioned. To me, schools of thought that make truth claims, be they ideologies, religions, or scientific, philosophical, scholarly, and engineering communities, have three main components:

• The people who adhere to the school of thought; they are the focus of James' lectures,
• The institutional framework (research institutions, churches, political parties, think tanks, journals, internet fora, conferences, etc.); this James mentioned but excluded from consideration, and
• The actual body of knowledge or belief system; it appears to remain unexamined so far.

Because 90% of the lectures are still to follow I don't want to dwell on this too much, but I find it interesting even at this stage that James appears curiously incurious about the first question that would come to my mind when faced with a school of thought: are its beliefs true? I guess I will see if he will go there later or if he will remain completely disinterested in that question throughout.

After having settled on the personal relationship of an individual human to the divine as his focus, James clarifies that believing in an actual personal god is not a criterion for him. He mentions 'Emersonianism' and Buddhism as examples of  systems that work to produce religious feelings without having personalised deities. I had never heard of Emersonianism, but it appears to be a variant of pantheism, seeing the whole universe as divine and (believe it or not) benign.

Finally, James spends an astonishingly large part of his second lecture on discussing what mindsets he considers truly religious and what mindsets he does not. Again and again he negatively contrasts the philosophical, Stoicist acceptance of the way the world is with the Christian ideal of a joyous embrace of whatever happens, no matter how terrible. Although he sometimes calls the ascetic or highly spiritual Christian 'extreme', the language he uses leaves no doubt that he considers mindless exultation in the face of, say, seeing a loved one dying terribly to be an admirable state of mind, as evidence that religion is a positive force for humanity.

Again I hesitate to immediately reject his argumentation given how little I have progressed into this book, but even here I cannot help wonder if this view does not rely quite a bit of conflation of many different injustices or tribulations to which, really, we would be justified to react in very different ways. We are not merely talking about "the universe is unfair, and a truly wise person will accept that they can only do their best and be happier for it". No, depending on what we are talking about and if we assume gods to exist we may reasonably take very different stances - and I would actually say that religious bliss is the appropriate stance in none of the various cases.

We cannot always get all we wanted. Some things are unachievable, and sometimes we have to compromise with other people. Accepting that is just a sign of maturity. (Embracing such compromises joyously would seem to be a bit twee, though.)

Then there are the evils we do to each other, such as theft, bullying, rape, murder, etc. Really one of the most frustrating facets of human existence is how much needless misery we cause each other, both deliberately and accidentally, given that we would have quite enough misery left to deal with even if we were all perfectly nice to each other (see next point). Point is, in this case the perpetrators generally have a moral responsibility to do better, and joyously accepting their bad deeds is both unreasonable and counterproductive, as it will set perverse incentives and reward bad actors.

What James must really be talking about, however, would have to be 'natural evils', harm to us that is no other human's fault, everything ranging from having to die of old age across natural disasters to people being born with a genetic disorder. Under the (atheist) assumption that there is no god behind these phenomena, that they just happen, James' preferred stance of a joyous embrace would be ridiculous. Stoicist acceptance of what cannot be undone while trying one's best to undo these evils is a more sensible approach.

But what if we assume that natural evils are caused or at least allowed to happen by an omnipotent god who could, with the snap of their metaphorical finger, deliver us from such needless suffering? Does it make sense, under this assumption, to write, "dear superior intelligence running the universe, please accept my heartfelt thanks for making me slowly die of an untreatable, incredibly painful disease; and while on that topic, thanks also for that landslide that crushed my best friend when we were twelve years old"?

I can't say that this would feel sane to me. I would have some very serious questions about the moral character and motivations of such gods, if I believed for a moment that they existed. But then again, James acknowledges himself that there are some people who are unable to have religious feelings as he defined them. I assume I am one of those people, for better or for worse.

And note also that there are presumably many people who would consider themselves religious but who do not feel what James considers to be the religious impulse at its most pure.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 1

I have started reading William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. Published first in 1902, this collection of twenty lectures is considered to be a classic of the study of religion. It approaches the subject with a psychological as opposed to theological, historical, or apologetic angle, but appears to remain rather charitable towards religious beliefs.

This becomes clear already in the first lecture, much of which is spent assuring the believing reader that they have no reason to be offended by a psychological examination of religious experience.

James calls 'medical materialism' the idea that religion originated as the hallucinations and ravings of 'psychopaths' and 'degenerates' and can therefore be dismissed. (His words; see e.g. the interpretation of Saint Paul's vision of Jesus as the result of an epileptic seizure.) He argues that the value of a phenomenon, here religious truth claims, cannot be deduced from its origins; as an argumentum ad absurdum he points out that a scientific insight would be judged on its own merits even if the scientist who gained it was suffering from some mental disorder. By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.

Well, fair enough, one might say. But while I cannot tell what the state of the discussion was around the year 1900, it seems as if this argument would miss the point of 'medical materialism' as it is applied today. Taking the position of an atheist, it is not the case that they attempt to answer the question of what to think of religious truth claims by looking at how they originated. They would most likely argue that that particular question has already been answered by applying the same criteria as James would (or at least the empirical one, see further down). They already take it as given that religious claims are largely false, and true only by lucky accident:

There is no evidence that there is something to us that lives on after death, and indeed the study of brain damages suggests that all there is to our personality is an emergent property of the physical. There is no evidence that the universe was created by a higher intelligence, and indeed it looks very much as if it wasn't. There is no evidence that the universe was created for our benefit, and indeed it looks very much as if it wasn't. There is no evidence that prayer works; and so on. There is also the small matter that hundreds of religions made and continue to make contradictory claims, meaning that only such a small percentage of them could be true as to be too close to zero percent to matter.

So given that background, the atheist now asks not what to think of a religious claim, but instead: How and why would people come up with something as wrong as that? And here hallucinations are a decent explanation for divine visions. That is why I feel that James' central argument in the first lecture misses its mark. But then again, he seemed to be more interested in reassuring religious readers than in criticising atheist ones anyway.

In this context it is also fascinating to examine what 'fruit' criteria James accepts as valid for judging spiritual and theological claims, now that he has rejected the 'root' criterion. He names three: immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness.

Immediate luminousness is also described as based on 'our immediate feeling' upon being exposed to the claim. This seems rather oddly subjective and emotional, and at least in my eyes falls flat as a useful criterion.

Philosophical reasonableness is to be understood as based on how the claim relates to 'the rest of what we hold as true'. This is the most sensible of the three criteria, because that is also how we do it in science. If, for example, somebody presents us with the theories underlying homeopathy, such as water memory, we may consider in comparison what we believe we already understand about physics and chemistry. We then find that either large bodies of scientific knowledge supported by numerous experiments and empirical observations must all be utterly, mind-boggingly wrong, or that, alternatively, homeopathy must be nonsense. At this stage it should be easy to figure out which of the two options strains our credulity less.

Still, in the context of religious truth claims, this approach still appears unsatisfactory. How, after all, are any religious truth claims justified? If they are justified based on fitting into our body of scientific knowledge they are simply more scientific truth claims. If not, as of course they are, then each religion constitutes a network of beliefs that may (or may not) be internally consistent but that is completely unmoored from other such networks and from observable reality. The philosophical reasonableness criterion will have a Christian accept a vision of Jesus in heaven as true and reject a vision of the imminent death of the sun as false, and it will have a precolumbian Aztec reject the former as false and accept the latter as true, with exactly the same justification. How useful.

Finally, moral helpfulness suffers from exactly the same flaw as the previous does in a religious context. Unless the belief system is at some point anchored on empirical, observable reality, it is turtles all the way down.

Andrew Sullivan on baking cakes

As always the following is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of my employer, friends, family or potted plants.

To follow news from the USA I regularly read the New York Magazine Daily Intelligencer. Once a week or so they have a column by Andrew Sullivan, who is the very peculiar combination of (a) Catholic, (b) homosexual, and (c) conservative. His average column follows a fairly predictable formula: first complaining about Donald Trump or the state of the Republican party, then a section break, then bashing left-wing activists over something or other. So as to maintain one's conservative reputation despite criticising conservatives, I presume?

Anyway, the most recent column takes a different approach. Titled "Let him have his cake", it takes the side of a religious baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and now finds himself in front of the US supreme court. Then there is a section break, and then he complains about Donald Trump. It is the other way around, you see?

Anyway, his gay wedding cake argument proceeds as follows:

1. If there are alternative solutions, like finding another baker, why force the point? Why take up arms to coerce someone when you can easily let him be -- and still celebrate your wedding?

That is probably what I would do in such a situation, as I am relatively conflict-shy. But this is a legal issue, one of principles, and as always in such situations it has to be asked what would happen if everybody made use of the 'right' to refuse service.

It is my understanding that the USA had a time when a black person could find themselves in a town where every single bar served only whites. Surely given the rampant religiosity in some parts of that country it is at least not immediately absurd to think that a gay couple might find themselves traveling through a town where every single hotel would turn them away by citing religious objections to gay marriage?

2. The baker's religious convictions are not trivial or obviously in bad faith [...] those religious convictions cannot be dismissed as arbitrary (even if you find them absurd). Opposition to same-sex marriage has been an uncontested pillar of every major world religion for aeons.

This is a really interesting argument. My first response is that yes, religious convictions are all entirely arbitrary by definition. That's just the thing about religion, it is based on faith instead of logic or empirical evidence. The founders of one religion just made up some random beliefs, and the founders of another religion just made up some different random beliefs, and that is why there is not just one religion on the planet, as would be expected if there existed an actual god who communicated with people. Conversely, ideas that are not arbitrary are shared across different belief systems and accordingly not religious per se.

(Just as an aside, I don't really see where in the Bible or the Koran it actually says "Thou shalt not marry somebody of the same sex." Does it actually say so somewhere? I know that the Bible considers gay sex to be an abomination, at least between men, but funnily enough that particular "conviction" is not really insisted on very much at this time, or at least not to the degree that any significant number of religious politicians tries to outlaw gay sex. Because such convictions are indeed arbitrary.)

So yes, the conviction that gays should not marry is arbitrary. And that raises the problem that if there is a right to discriminate based on religious conviction, people can simply make up additional convictions to refuse service to other groups and in other cases. It is hard to argue that some taxi driver's newfound religious conviction that they do not want to drive around an interracial couple is 'arbitrary' if something as obviously arbitrary as not being able to use a light switch on the Sabbath is considered not arbitrary.

Interestingly, Sullivan seems to understand the problem - I worry that a decision that endorses religious freedom could effectively nullify a large swathe of antidiscrimination legislation - but ultimately this worry does not carry the day with him. Is he perhaps a bit naive about the intentions of the other side?

As a mirror image of the above we then get the following:

3. Equally, I worry that a ruling that backs the right of the state to coerce someone into doing something that violates their religious conscience will also have terrible consequences. A law that controls an individual's conscience violates a core liberal idea.

I do not understand what terrible consequences he expects. The consequences would be that people are treated equally, hardly something I would call terrible. And I think he confuses "controlling an individual's conscience" and "making them behave professionally". Those are not the same thing. An individual is allowed to believe that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, but they should not be allowed to discriminate against gays. It is really as simple as that, even knowing that Sullivan will call me a "fanatic" for seeing it like this.

4. Much of the argument for marriage equality was that it would not force anyone outside that marriage to approve or disapprove of it. One reason we won that debate is because many straight people simply said to themselves, "How does someone else's marriage affect me?" and decided on those grounds to support or acquiesce to such a deep social change. It seems grotesquely disingenuous now for the marriage-equality movement to bait and switch on that core "live and let live" argument.

Well, I can only say that I find this argument rather disingenuous. The discussion went to the effect of, "if Bob and Jim are allowed to marry, your own heterosexual marriage does not lose any of its status, so what is it to you?" If the discussion was to the effect of "hey, we just want you to let Bob and Jim marry, but you can still treat them like second class humans and discriminate against them", then I have missed that.

5. A commenter on Rod Dreher's blog proffers a series of important questions in this respect: "If the cake shop loses, does that mean that if I'm, say, a freelance designer or an artist or a writer or a photographer, I can no longer pick and choose my clients? If the Westboro Baptist Church comes to me, I can't reject them on the grounds that they're deeply un-Christian scumbags? If I'm Jewish, do I have to design a Hitler's Birthday cake with swastikas on it? Would a Muslim cake-shop owner be forced to design a cake that shows an Islamic terrorist with crosshairs over his face, a common target design in most gun shops in America? Can a gay, atheist web designer choose not to do work for the Catholic Church, or would we have the government compel him to take on a client he loathes?"

This is perhaps the superficially most convincing argument presented by Sullivan. (Partly it may be that I find this style of argument particularly useful.) However, I feel that it mixes up a few different scenarios.

Yes, it seems to me that somebody who opens a shop or provides a service should not be able to refuse service to a church merely for being a church. That would be exactly the same kind of discrimination as refusing service to homosexuals, and it would be unacceptable to me. On the other hand, I think that a Hitler's birthday cake or a face in cross-hairs is a different kind of message to write in glazing than "Bob & Jim".

Yes, I get the idea that the latter supports gay marriage and is thus as objectionable to a certain kind of deeply religious person as mass murder is to other kinds of persons, but I believe that one would have to be quite nihilistic to not see the difference between those two points of view. One message seems objectionable because of an arbitrary, made-up religious dogma, the others are objectionable because they are demonstrably hateful and evil. Still, I understand how this is a difficult difference to see for some who hold a certain view of the first amendment of the US constitutions, for the kind of person who, for example, sees European countries outlawing Holocaust denial as engaging in a terrible restriction of free speech and taking the first step towards totalitarianism.

Finally,

6. It always worries me when gays advocate taking freedom away from other people. It worries me as a matter of principle. But it also unsettles me because some gay activists do not seem to realize that the position they're taking is particularly dangerous for a tiny and historically despised minority.

Again, these are two very different types of freedom we are talking about. Historically, the freedom taken away from gays was the freedom to exist. The freedom Sullivan considers to be taken away from the baker is the freedom to discriminate against others. I find it puzzling how the latter can possibly be held to be a freedom worth defending, let alone be equated with the former.

What exactly is new about New Atheism?

On Sunday I went back to the book fair with my family, and of course I bought another few books. One of them is a collection of essays written by Bertrand Russell. As its title is Why I am not a Christian it is unsurprising that its first chapter is his talk of the same title, which he originally gave in 1927.

Summarising in order, the talk makes the following points:

He starts by giving his definition of Christian. For Russell this requires at a minimum belief in the existence of a god, in immortality, and that Jesus Christ was "the best and wisest of men".

Next, Russell disposes of several common arguments for the existence of God, observing along the way that the most frequently used arguments have become less respectable over time. The first cause argument falls flat the moment somebody asks "who made God?", because if God is allowed not to have an explanation then one could just as well allow the universe not to have an explanation.

The natural law argument does not work because it conflates human laws, which are prescriptive and indeed have law-givers, with natural laws, which are merely descriptive, merely scientific descriptions of what happens instead of prescriptions of what should happen. As such they do not need a law-giver. Russell also points out that science has shown them to be largely "statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was." Finally he adds a Euthyphro style argument, that laws are not really laws if God just made them up, but that God is not required if they are truly laws of nature.

The argument from design was destroyed by Charles Darwin, and in that context Russell also introduces the argument from evil to show that the world does not look as if it was created by a benevolent, omnipotent being.

The moral argument is quickly disposed of by applying the Euthyphro dilemma.

Russell calls the argument for the remedying of injustice, i.e. the idea that god must exist or else there would be no ultimate justice in the world, very "curious", and I can only agree. I have only once seen it used in seriousness, and it is such blatant wishful thinking that it hardly needs refutation.

Having dealt with the existence of God, Russell transitions to the character of Christ. He calls "excellent" several of Jesus' teachings that I would consider unrealistic, for example 'turn the other cheek', but sarcastically points out that Christians do not actually follow those teachings. ("I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.")

As an aside, Russell mentions that "historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all".

More importantly, Russell says that there are "defects" in the teachings of Jesus the character of the gospels, most prominently that he mistakenly believed that the end of the world was imminent and that he believed in and took "a certain pleasure" in hell, i.e. eternal torture. The undeserved killing of a fig tree also gets a mention.

At this point Russell has explained why he is not a Christian. He now deals with the idea that even if religion is wrong it should still be promoted because it makes people behave morally by pointing out that it does the exact opposite. "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world."

The talk ends by arguing that fear of the unknown and of death is the foundation of religion, and that it is time to dispose of it and build a good world on a new foundation: "Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations."

-----

Russell was certainly an excellent writer, at least to my taste. He was concise, clear, and to the point. But really what struck me most when I read this talk / essay is that there really is no New to what has been called New Atheism these past fifteen years or so, i.e. the movement often considered personified by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

Because what really is its claim to novelty? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the claim that religion is not just wrong but harmful, and that its influence should be reduced. But go back a few paragraphs and you will see that Russell said the same in 1927.

Another idea is that its novelty might be in the view that science in particular has made belief in gods untenable, a position that is often derided as 'scientism' by philosophers who believe that they have a monopoly on refuting religious beliefs. Again, nothing new: where today some New Atheist might argue from evolution, astrophysics and neuroscience, a hundred years ago an atheist like Russell argued from evolution and astrophysics. And to be honest, neuroscience has found nothing in the last thirty years that refutes the concept of an immaterial soul more thoroughly than what people could already observe in the bronze age, for example that a strike to the head or drinking alcohol confuses our thinking.

Even rather specific side-issues have remained surprisingly unchanged. Richard Carrier et al. have in recent years made a lot of waves with the argument that Jesus never existed, and would you not know it, ninety years ago Russell mentioned this idea in a tone that suggests it was fairly widely accepted among educated people.

Really I don't think that arguments for or against gods have made much progress since 1859, and if somebody wanted a short but reasonably thorough introduction to atheist thought they would even today be well served with reading Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian.

Germany trip 2016, part 6: Hamburg Botanic Garden

Today we visited the Botanic Garden of Hamburg, Germany. Not, however, the old, well-known park Planten un Blomen, but the gardens at the second site in the suburb of Klein Flottbek. They are right next to the biological teaching and research centre (Biozentrum) of the Hamburg University.

The gardens are large and offer a huge diversity of sections, including steppe plants, crop plants, medical plants, regional sections representing everything from northern Germany to South America, and much more. A few examples:

The Bauerngarten, or farmer's garden. It features a nice selection of useful plants and ornamentals. There are also some old farming machines exhibited in a corner.

The garden designers show some humour in the Alpinum, the alpine section. Here is a sign as one would see it in the German Alps, reading in translation: Experience with the Alpine environment, a sure step, and a head for heights required. Signed, the German Alps Society.

A few metres on we find this Gipfelkreuz, as one would usually see on the summit of a large mountain (in overly Christian countries, that is). The background shows what dizzying heights the intrepid Alpine hiker will have braved at this point.

While on the topic of crosses, the weirdest part of the botanic gardens might be the Bibelgarten, which consists of plants mentioned in the holy book of one particular religion and signage listing the relevant bible verses. Let's just say that Germany is not the most secular country on the planet and move on.

Much nicer is the Asian section. Not only is it very well landscaped and features beautiful plants...

...it also includes a Japanese rock garden. Despite a slightly confusing sign that seems to forbid it visitors are invited to walk across the larger rocks and the platform but obviously shouldn't step onto the pebble patterns.

Finally, the systematic section. Despite being very new its explanatory signage suffers a bit from scala naturae thinking (e.g. ginkgoes are described as the "oldest" gymnosperms). It is, however, an unusually well landscaped systematic section; this kind of display is all too often built as a simple, linear row of flowerbeds.

The garden does not have an entry fee. Unfortunately the visitor shop is only open on weekends.

Before seeing the gardens I was also able to pay a visit to the Hamburg Herbarium (HBG) and to study some specimens two levels below the ground. The herbarium is huge - I was told 1.8 million specimens -, and the vaults are accordingly large and were in fact something of a maze to me. One factor may be that, as the picture shows, the specimens are not stored in compactus units. I am grateful that I was able to examine a species I could not lay my hands on in Australia, so all in all a great day today.

Bayesianism and history

I have recently read with some interest the exchange between mathematician Tim Hendrix and atheist activist and historian Richard Carrier regarding the latter's use of Bayesian statistics to conclude a very low likelihood for the historicity of Jesus.

To summarise, the surface question is whether Christianity was founded by a guy called Jesus who actually walked around and had a few followers who later deified him, or whether Christianity was founded by a bunch of people who believed that Jesus was a god, then wrote a fantasy novel about that god walking around as a human, and later forgot that the novel was only a novel.

The next more fundamental question, and the one at the core of the discussion between the two, is whether Carrier used Bayesian statistics correctly. Finally, underlying all this is the even more general question whether it makes any sense at all to use Bayesian statistics in history, in particular in a quantitative way with actual numbers instead of merely intuitively as a method of organising one's reasoning.

I have written before that I tend towards historicism, then focusing on the observation that quite a few details of the gospels do not make sense to me under the assumption that the authors could freely invent the stories. Somewhat semi-formally one could say that I consider e.g. the probability of the Jesus character being from Nazareth given the hypothesis of the gospels being a novel to be rather low; I would expect a freely invented Jesus to be "Jesus of Bethlehem" because that would more conveniently fulfil a prophecy than the way the authors actually have it fulfilled. On the other hand, I consider the probability of the Jesus character being from Nazareth given the hypothesis of there having been a human who was inconveniently from Nazareth to be rather high.

Reading through Tim Hendrix' critique of Carrier's work and through Carrier's reply, I must admit that I cannot follow every detail, nor can I obviously judge how best to interpret the individual lines from Paul's writings. There are really two main issues that stood out to me, the probability of deification versus historicisation and the derivation of a prior probability from a reference class.

Deification or historicisation

Unless one were to believe that the gospels are completely accurate in their descriptions of every detail of the Jesus story, something that should be impossible even to a faithful Christian in the light of their internal contradictions, it is clear that they contain some material that was made up and some material that at least looks as if it could plausibly be based on actual happenings. For example, even an atheist like myself could assume that a real life doomsday preacher called Jesus did actually in one memorable instance ignore his mother with the justification that his followers were his true family. After his death, however, his followers invented all manner of supernatural stories about him to make him sound more awesome as they tried to convert more people, and thus over the decades he was deified, i.e. raised to god status.

Again, the mythicist idea is the inverse. He started as a god and was subsequently historicised, i.e. his cult started believing that he had really walked the earth although he never did.

The first question here is how probable we should consider either of these options to be, and the second is how probable the gospels would be under either assumption. I must say deification seems like a complete no-brainer to me. It is rather obvious that cultists would have a motive to make supernatural claims or even deify their cult founder, and in fact we have plenty of recent examples of this behaviour. In antiquity this was standard procedure for many important people, especially deceased or sometimes even living rulers.

Carrier argues that historicisation was also extremely frequent: "Hercules, Osiris, Dionysus, Moses, and so on ... were all non-historical yet came to be believed to be historical". I will grant Moses, but I must admit that I remain somewhat skeptical about the others. Surely educated Greeks and Egyptians of Antiquity would have known that Dionysus and Osiris were gods that had some fancy stories attached to themselves? Honestly the idea that anybody would seriously have believed these or Hercules to have existed was entirely new to me when I read this argumentation. And to parallel my observation of recent examples of deification, how often have people in the last few hundred years started believing that characters from novels really existed?

But be that as it may, at best one could conclude that people would have made either mistake with a similar probability. It is further my understanding that the gospels dated to be written first are the ones that depict Jesus as more human, whereas the latest one depicts him the most spiritual. This seems odd under the hypothesis of people slowly forgetting that he was supposed to be merely a spiritual being but fits the hypothesis of people slowing deifying him.

The reference class

Bayesian statistics needs prior probabilities to get off the ground, and this is often one of the strongest concerns of critics of Bayesianism, be it in phylogenetic analysis or elsewhere: how can your priors be justified? It should also be noted that the prior is extremely important, because if it is very high or very low it would require extremely strong additional evidence to push the posterior probability in a different direction. For example, if your prior belief that Columbus reached America in 1492 is very close to 100% certainty, merely showing you a book giving the year as 1489 will not immediately convince you; you may have a moment of doubt but will most likely argue that the book was written by incompetents.

In the case of Jesus, and if I understand the discussion between Hendrix and Carrier correctly, Carrier apparently assigned Jesus to a "reference class" and then used the percentage of people from that reference class who may have been historical as the prior probability of Jesus being historical (c. 6%). The reference class is that of mythical Rank-Raglan heroes. Hendrix criticises this practice for reasons that are a bit too technical for me to fully appreciate, but he also points out that the followers of a human Jesus may well have deliberately assigned him traits to deify him into that class, into the status of Greek cultural heroes and gods. I have a few more problems.

First, does Jesus even fit into that reference class? I must admit that I am highly skeptical in general of this kind of attempt to construct commonalities across different stories. A trope like "comic relief character" is one thing, but "all these stories are basically the same, at least if we ignore all inconvenient differences" is quite another claim. The Rank-Raglan type of hero has a large number of traits, and there does not appear to be a clear cut-off for how many of them a character has to have to be considered sufficiently Rank-Raglan. Subsequently the 22 traits as listed in Wikipedia, with my personal understanding of whether Jesus fits:

1. Mother is a royal virgin - Not royal but virgin, so let's say 0.5 points.
2. Father is a king - Nope.
3. Father often a near relative to mother - Not sure, but I think no?
4. Unusual conception - Yes, 1 point.
5. Hero reputed to be son of god - Yes, at least in later view, 1 point.
6. Attempt to kill hero as an infant, often by father or maternal grandfather - 0.5 for first half of this trait.
7. Hero spirited away as a child - Exile in Egypt in at least one gospel, so let's give it 1 point.
8. Reared by foster parents in a far country - Far country alone would double-count the previous trait, and no foster parents, so I'd say nope.
9. No details of childhood - Non-canonical gospels develop it, so nope.
10. Returns or goes to future kingdom - Bit silly, but okay, 1 point.
11. Is victor over king, giant, dragon or wild beast - Nope, unless in the most ridiculously figurative sense when he resists the temptation by Satan.
12. Marries a princess (often daughter of predecessor) - Nope.
13. Becomes king - Again, not really unless interpreted super-figuratively.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully - Nope.
15. He prescribes laws - Kinda? He had teachings, so let's give this 1 point.
16. Later loses favor with gods or his subjects - Lost favour with Judas I guess, so another 1 pity point.
17. Driven from throne and city - Nope.
18. Meets with mysterious death - Nope.
19. Often at the top of a hill - Yes, 1 point.
20. His children, if any, do not succeed him - Not applicable, 0.5 pity points.
21. His body is not buried - It is, but then disappears, so 0.5 points.
22. Has one or more holy sepulchers or tombs - Trivially applicable to everybody who is venerated after their death, including many historical people, but well, let's say 1 point.

So summing up I get 10 points, not even half. According to Wikipedia this would be somewhere between Robin Hood - not clear if based on some historical thief - and the definitely historical Alexander the Great. This does not impress me as an argument for inclusion in the Rank-Raglan class, if such a box even makes sense in the first place.

Second, is this not simply circular reasoning? Choosing a class of mythical characters as the reference seems rather convenient. If I were to replicate the analysis, I would be mightily tempted to choose the reference class "cult founder who was deified after their death", eh voilà, 100% prior probability of historicity! And I would not even be able to say how that is any more problematic than the Rank-Raglan choice.

Note that I do not claim professional expertise either in Ancient history or in Bayesian mathematics, merely a long personal interest in history and some professional exposure to Bayesian analysis in a completely different context. I have not even read Carrier's book so far, so clearly what I write should be taken with a bucket of salt. But at the moment Hendrix seems a wee bit more convincing to this non-expert.

The historicity of Jesus

One topic that regularly comes up in parts of the blogosphere I read is whether there was a real human being at the root of the Jesus character of the Bible or whether, alternatively, such a person never existed. What the alternative looks like in detail is a bit unclear and depends on who is arguing; one of the favourites seems to be the idea of Jesus as originally a divine being in some other realm. Then the gospels were written as allegorical teaching material or fantasy novels, and a few generations later all Christians had weirdly forgotten that those were only novels and became wrongly convinced that Jesus had actually walked the earth.

Both those who argue for an entirely mythical Jesus and those who see a real life human doomsday cult leader at the root of Christianity make their cases with a lot of conviction, in fact with so much certainty that one would usually assume they must be really sure that they got it figured out. Unfortunately, again, both sides do so, and I am clearly not qualified to evaluate the Ancient Greek source material and suchlike.

For what it is worth, I lean towards the assumption that there was a human cult leader named Jesus (I understand it would then have been something like Yoshua?) at the root of Christianity, obviously in my personal opinion without any actual virgin birth, divinity, resurrection or other miracles involved. My main problem with the mythicist position is that it seems really hard to explain the content of the gospels under their hypothesis. Just to pick the three first items that pop into my mind, and of course none of these thoughts are original to me:

Religious instruction

A few days ago we got a form to fill out if we want our daughter to participate in upcoming religious instruction classes. They are generically Christian, on the lines of "learn about the kind of God Christians believe in"; that is, they leave open for the moment whether that god is an ill-defined feeling that everything will turn out alright or the kind that boils you in a lake of molten sulphur for having had impure thoughts.

Anyway, it is interesting to consider the different approaches taken by various countries. Despite being the most religious Western country, the USA are famously officially secular, and so there is no religious instruction in public schools.

In my native Germany, however, there are pretty much official state religions - Lutheranism in the north, Catholicism in the south. Not only does the government collect church taxes from all Lutherans and Catholics, but public schools everywhere except in the state of Berlin offer classes in their locally dominant religion as the default option, with atheists having to actively opt out. At least that is how it was when I grew up, but to the best of my knowledge the only thing that has changed is that some areas have become more open about offering an Islamic option.

Australia, or the Australian Capital Territory at any rate, sits kind of in the middle. As indicated above, there are generically Christian classes on offer in public schools. On the plus side, they appear to be opt-in instead of opt-out and they are run by volunteers, which means that apart from overheads like providing a room etc. no taxpayer money is wasted on sectarian beliefs.

However, this comes with a downside: the classes are run by volunteers. Although I am happy to be corrected I assume that they are unlikely to all have the same standards and pedagogical expertise as trained and certified teachers. Perhaps worse, in contrast to a professional teacher who is paid to do their job, unpaid volunteers are more likely to be motivated entirely by missionary zeal; it is at least conceivable that this self-selection effect will have what I will diplomatically call interesting consequences. And indeed one hears stories...

As should have become obvious, I am in two minds about whether the German professional system or the Australian voluntarist system is better. I am, however, quite positive that of all three I personally would prefer the American one: Just keep religion out of public schools and let the various sects organise religious instruction in their own time.

And what to make of the openly sectarian private schools supported by hundreds of millions of tax dollars is yet another issue.

Will you only believe that the sky is blue if a recent peer-reviewed paper says so?

The usual disclaimer: The following is my personal opinion. It is not my professional opinion and much less necessarily the opinion of any other person or any institution associated with me in any way.

Sometimes I see the kind of discussion where one person will claim that science has refuted the existence of gods, and then somebody else will offer a challenge on the following lines:

If you are going to respond that that's because "science" has decided that there is no God, surely you can point me to a number of high profile papers in Nature or Science that clearly shows how such a conclusion was arrived at, scientifically.

Even if one is convinced that science has not and cannot disprove the existence of gods this argument seems very weak.

Euthyphro

The following is, once more, my personal opinion and not necessarily that of my employer, colleagues, friends, family or pot plants. Also, I do not claim to be an expert on moral philosophy or theology.

Continuing my readings of Thomist theologian-philosopher Edward Feser suggested by commenter Cale, I have decided to tackle the Euthyphro dilemma next, out of genuine personal interest. (I will probably rue leaving the posts I find least interesting for last...)

Admittedly, Feser's real topic in the linked post is whether god has, as he puts it, obligations to us, which he answers with no. But I find that much less interesting than the religious replies to Euthyphro. For what it is worth, I see two possible answers to his question. From an intuitive, human perspective it seems fairly obvious that somebody has a responsibility for what they cause and create, and thus a hypothetical creator-god would have responsibility for us. Stepping outside of everyday moral intuition and trying to justify that responsibility from first principles, however, I come up empty-handed because I personally do not see any way to bridge the is-ought gap. But that means merely that ethics and moral imperatives are made up by humans, leaving us again with the human intuition that says that you have a responsibility for your creations.

Anyway, Euthyphro - what is it again? It was Plato's (or supposedly Socrates') response to divine command theory, the idea that our moral compass can only be derived from the gods. I understand that in the original text, which I admittedly have not read, the discussion was rather more complicated, but it boils down to the question whether something is good because the gods command it or whether something is good independently of whether they command it or not.

'Classical' theism and a simple god

Some time ago a visitor to this site called Cale took issue with a post in which I expressed my very personal opinion that many religious believers have got it exactly backwards: In my view, a universe without god is less depressing than a hypothetical one in which we would be the marionettes of a god; thinking standard hopes about life after death, heaven and hell through to their logical conclusion leads to absurdities and horror; and religious faith makes a spectacularly weak foundation for moral behaviour.

Although Cale was somewhat cryptic on what precisely he disagreed with, I believe he believes that I have a wrong concept of god, and that if I had the correct concept in my head the religious perspective (of the universe being run by a god etc.) would appear more desirable than I am so far willing to grant.

To give me something to think about, Cale helpfully pasted several links to other websites into the comment field. The first few are to blog posts by one Edward Feser who advertises himself as a writer and philosopher, where 'philosophy' apparently means following one very specific school of Medieval theology. The remainder have such inviting titles as “Original Sin and its Consequences”. Because something like sin is unlikely to make much impression on somebody who has yet to be convinced that there is something to sin against, it is perhaps more productive to have a look at Feser first. A quick scan shows that Feser, for his part, constantly refers back to what he calls 'classical theism', so the post with that title would probably be the best place to start.

For the following note again that this is all just my personal view, and that I do not claim any official or professional expertise in this area. Furthermore, I am not trying to antagonise anybody needlessly, but I like discussing issues like these and don't see why I shouldn't present my honest opinion, especially here where nobody has to read it if they don't want to.

Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen

It often seems to me as if the milieu or class of technology-savvy and allegedly, according to themselves at least, "rational" people who amalgamate around institutions such as MIRI and Less Wrong and around futurism gurus such as Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky believe pretty much the same things as people they would, as alleged rationalists in the computer age, most likely consider hopelessly backwards. The difference is that they cleverly tacked a 21st century terminology onto the same beliefs:

Au contraire

One of the things that has often struck me when contemplating religion is that I do not only disagree with several core claims made in its favour, but I feel that these claims are completely upside-down. In other words, not only are they wrong, but instead I feel that they are so much the opposite of what is really the case that one might start to suspect psychological projection to be at work.

I am not thinking of claims about actual evidence for the truth of religion - that is a different issue - but of second order claims about the benefits of religion. In particular, popular pronouncements along these lines:

1. Life without god is totally pointless and meaningless; we need god and divine commands to give meaning to our lives.
2. The conclusion that we are annihilated at death is depressing, and belief in an immortal soul, in our continued existence after death is much better.
3. Atheists must be immoral because without gods and holy books they have nothing to base their morals on. Therefore, they should not be trusted.

One after the other...

So how great is a god really that needs gunmen to do his work?

As always the following is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of my employer, line manager, family, friends, colleagues, computers or pot plants.

So about the terrorist attack on Charlie Hedbo...

I think the best way to react to somebody being murderously offended at the publication of satire is to repost some satire:

This is from Jesus and Mo, a wonderfully cheeky weekly comic strip, although admittedly the Mohammed character is said to be a body double.

To a certain degree I am trying to understand the logic of the murderers, although I am aware that one probably should not expect much logic. Reportedly, as they were massacring their victims, they shouted "we have avenged the prophet Mohammed" and "God is great". This raises the immediate question of why god, if he is indeed as great as they claim, cannot deal with blaspheming satirists himself, or in other words why exactly the murderers in cases like these think they need to commit such murders in god's name.

Surely if drawing a caricature of Mohammed is worthy of terrible punishment, god can just throw the artists into hell after they are dead? Or if he needs a speedier solution, maybe god can strike them with lightning? But of course that doesn't happen; why it is nearly as if god didn't actually exist! Perhaps the shouts of "god is great" primarily serve to reassure those who do the shouting, to drown out the little voice of doubt inside their heads; and to get rid of outside voices of doubt they use guns.

Sectarianism

On a little field trip yesterday I saw what must have been the saddest cemetery I ever visited. A straight path across a weedy lawn, and at intervals there were sign posts pointing off to the sides: Catholic; Anglican; Methodist; Jewish; Independent.

Are different sects so icky that the religious have to keep them apart even in death? I am an atheist, but I would not have any problem with being buried between a fundamentalist Muslim and a Scientologist. Who cares? We are all humans.

And that poor Methodist grave. There was but a single one in that area, all alone by itself.

Weird Christian pamphlet, part 2

The fourth and last page of the religious pamphlet we found in our letterbox deals with the mark of the beast.

 DO NOT RECEIVE
The Mark of the Beast (Verichip)
"So that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. his number is 666"
(Rev.13:17-18)

It is surely not an insight original to me that the author of Revelation appears to have been a bit incoherent. This stuff just doesn't make any sense.

Soon money will be useless and in place of it, the will be put on the forehead, or on his right hand, this will be the only way to buy and sell. Leading edge biometrics technology is already being tested in various parts of the world. We beg you dear friends; do not ever receive any kind of implants used as personal tracking LD. "it you receive it on your right hand or forehead you will go to Hell and suffer forever!"

I have no idea what an LD is, but it is clear what the pamphlet author is aiming at here. They believe that a personal identification microchip formerly called VeriChip and now PositiveID is the mark of the beast mentioned in Revelation, that soon everybody will need to get one implanted into their head or right hand, and that those who have it implanted will go to hell.

The first and most obvious problem I see for this prediction is that VeriChip was not actually ever intended to be implanted into either of those two places on the body but instead into the arm above the elbow. It is also just plain unrealistic to assume that people would, or could, ever be forced to have it implanted. Even if there were no Christians to protest because they connect it with the mark of the beast, most of us would still be squicked out by the idea and consider it a massive violation of our bodily autonomy. Interestingly, in reality such violations are generally only possible if they find a religious justification...

A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice:
"If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. he will be tor-mented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who wor-ship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name." (Rev.14:9-11)

This paragraph then is a bit puzzling because it implies that what brings God's wrath upon us is receiving the mark AND worshipping the beast, implying that if one is merely forced to receive the mark but does not worship the beast one might be fine. At least that is my plain reading here, and it makes sense that a benevolent and just deity would not punish their followers for having been forced into something. But well, that is just my understanding; perhaps religious logic is just different from standard logic...

Weird Christian pamphlet, part 1

My wife recently found a small flyer in our letterbox that had apparently been distributed to all the neighbourhood. Interestingly, it does not contain any address, it does not advertise a book or anything else one is supposed to buy, and it does not promote any specific church. It seems as if the author really, truly believes what they wrote and merely aims to convince people instead of trying to sell them a membership or something like that.

I find it fairly interesting, perhaps mostly because I have rarely interacted with believers like the author, and find it very hard to understand them. The title page consists mostly of a garish, kitschy picture of numerous white-robed, white-skinned men on white horses being led by a face-less, red-robed person raising a sword. Because there is something that looks a bit like the eye of Sauron in the background I thought at first they had stolen the picture from some old edition of the Lord of the Rings, but on further consideration it is probably meant to be the sun with a bit of a smudge in front of it.

Under the kitsch we find this piece of text, with the first line massive and the subsequent ones so small as to be barely legible:

The Second Coming of Jesus Christ
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.
1 Thessalonians 4/16-17

So the pamphlet is obviously about the rapture. This should be fun.

As expected, the second and third page deal with the rapture itself, although the fourth later takes a different track.

WHAT IS THE RAPTURE?
This when Jesus Christ comes for His saints, those who have by faith completely trusted the eternity of their souls to His saving power with nothing else added.

Fine, but how do you know any of that?

"For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord."
1 THESSALONIANS 4/16-17

Ah yes, we had that one already on the title page. Paul, the founder of Christianity, wrote a letter to some other Christians in which he said that the rapture is going to happen. The thing is, I can write a letter in which I say that I will get $10,000,000; sadly, that does not make it true either.

And really it is quite astonishing how confident the rapture-believers are considering that Jesus himself said that it would happen during the lifetime of some of the people listening to him (Mark 9:1, Matthew 16:28), that Paul, if interpreted plainly in the quotation above, apparently expected it to happen during his lifetime, and that numerous other predicted apocalypses have failed to happen since. At some point most sane people would start to reconsider, but perhaps religious logic is just very different from standard logic.

WILL YOU BE LEFT BEHIND?
Those left behind will cry out for help and comfort. Questions will rise in every heart. Where did the "Christians" go? One man, Satan's soul-incarnate, the anti-Christ, will have all the answers.

The is the start of a trend for our author, a trend of asking rhetorical questions in the subheadings and then failing to address them. In this case, "people will be confused" is not actually a valid answer to "will you be left behind?". Pro-tip: Perhaps try "yes" or "yes, unless you accept Jesus" next time, that would work much better.

That being said, even if one were to accept the premises of belief in the rapture without evidence, at this point the whole story starts to fall apart. Should the rapture actually take place and all members of one specific sect suddenly disappear, people would not have unanswered questions because so many Christians have done what the author did and made sure pretty much everybody in Western civilisation has heard of this.

We would not put "Christians" into scare quotes because we are, sadly, well acquainted with their beliefs, nor would we wonder what is going on. We would simply say, "damn, looks like those loonies were right after all", and we would know that the anti-Christ is the anti-Christ so he wouldn't be able to deceive. One could call this a self-refuting prophecy.

"The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness."
2THESSALONIANS 2:9-12.

Ah, so this is how it works. As in the case of the Pharaoh whose heart he hardened, god will control peoples' minds so they believe Satan's lies, and then he can say, "ha, you believed the lies, now burn in hell". It is interesting to contemplate what that does to human agency and the free will defence generally used by Christians when faced with the problem of evil. In effect, it is as if somebody dragged their dog into the kitchen then tortured it to death for the crime of ... having entered the kitchen.

I can just about understand how somebody could believe in a god who would do this, if they were born into a deeply Christian household and raised in complete ignorance. What I cannot understand is how somebody can believe in such a god and at the same time believe that such a god is worthy of worship. If I believed in such a god (and of course I don't), I would reject it for being a cruel, murderous psychopath. Ah, maybe that is how the leftovers end up joining Satan, because he is less of a barbarous monster than the Christian god?

THE GREAT TRIBULATION
Peace will reign for 3 1/2 years.

Note how this paragraph cleverly implies but fails to openly state that the bible provides the detail of three and a half years. Because as far as I have read, it doesn't. The schedule has apparently been invented based on some piece of text that talks about a week and has no connection to eschatology.

Then in this time called The Great Tribulation in Rev.7:14, all of God's judgment will be meted out on this world as Satan's emissaries, the beast, the anti-Christ, and the false prophet wreak havoc on mankind.

Again, religious logic must be very different from regular logic, because it is unclear to me what they are trying to say here. God will, as we see in the following paragraph, cause terrible catastrophes and wipe out most of the world's population, so in what sense is it Satan's emissaries who "wreak havoc"? Sounds a bit too much like a bully beating somebody up and then telling them, "now look what you did, you went and hurt yourself".

Revelation 16 records 7 great judgment poured out on a God-forsaking world and its satanic leaders. Putrefying painful sores, seas and rivers filled with dead men's blood, and the stench of dying aquatic life will plague man and beast. The sun will scorch the blasphemous flesh of man, and then disappear into the blackness of full darkness, as men gnaw their tongues in pain.

It is interesting to note that everything from this point on makes even less sense. If the sun goes dark, everything on earth dies in short order, and none of the subsequent events can possibly happen. This may have made sense to some ignoramus on a Greek island in late antiquity, but today it is just embarrassing and best serves to demonstrate that revelation is nothing but an all too human fever-dream.

I should also mention that all grammatical and typological mistakes are as in the original.

The Euphrates River is dried up and God sends great earthquakes, tremendous thundering, and lightning, as huge hail stones pound the remnant of earth's inhabitants. "It is done." thunders from heavens as God's wrath is satisfied.

This too, by the way. To the author and his audience in the Middle East, the fate of the Euphrates River must have appeared of utmost significance. To a worldwide audience today, it is basically some odd creek somewhere in a distant corner of the globe. Few parts of revelation betray the stultifyingly narrow horizon of the people who wrote the bible as clearly as this. They claimed to know the true past and future of the world but would have been surprised to be informed of the existence of Iceland, let alone of Australia or the two American continents with all their diverse human cultures, plants and animals.

THE SECOND COMING
And then, the second phase of Christ's Second Coming transpires!
"...The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints."
1 THESSALONIANS 3:13.
He comes and defeats the armies of the anti-Christ.

Armies, remember, that will at this stage be frozen blocks of dead organic matter in a world of complete darkness because the sun has gone dark. Should not be too hard to defeat them under those circumstances, so please don't brag that much about it.

The Lord Jesus will then reign for 1000 years!

Again, the man-madeness of these prophecies seeps from every pore. Why would the creator of the universe, if he (it?) had provided this information, consider multiples of ten to be significant? On the other hand, it is no surprise that a sapient animal with ten fingers does.

You say, "I just can't believe it. I've so many questions."
Let's allow God's word to answer them for you!

Translation: Let's allow the incoherent writings of some guys in antiquity who would have considered a cigarette lighter to be a divine miracle answer them for you.

WHEN WILL THE RAPTURE TAKE PLACE? SOON!
"So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him." MATTHEW 24:44.
"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." MATTHEW 24:36.

I mentioned before the author's habit of not actually answering their own rhetorical questions. "When will the rapture take place?" - "Let's allow God's word to answer this question: no idea, really." - "Uh, thanks for that clear answer I guess."

WILL IT AFFECT ME? YES!
"Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left." MATTHEW 24:40.

We are on a roll here: "Will it affect me?" - "Yes, because Matthew said that some farmer will be raptured."

If you miss the rapture you will be left behind to go through the Great Tribulation, then, as a deluded non believer, you will end up in hell for all eternity.

Honestly, one wonders why the Great Tribulation with all its punishments is stressed so much because compared to hell for all eternity the suffering it entails is insignificant.

HOW CAN IT BE TRUE? JESUS SAID SO!
"And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." JOHN 14:3.
Jesus Christ would not lie. He promised to come again, and He will, for those who are ready, THE SAVED.

Let's just say that if I were asked to peer review this line of argumentation, I would have to suggest major revision.

WHAT SHOULD I DO? REPENT-BELIEVE-BE SAVED!
"Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that time of refreshing may come from the Lord," ACTS 3:19.
"Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved-you and your household." ACTS 16:31.

The above line about the household may have made sense in a time where only free men counted for anything, and all their wives, children and servants were seen as their possessions. Today, a line like this looks distinctly odd. Except to our author apparently.

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God." EPHESIANS2:8.

Because this is at the end of the third page, and thus at the end of the part that deals with the rapture and tribulation, I assume that it was meant as a positive note: see, god has given us a gift! But it does nothing but once more raise the issue that the creator of the universe, as seen by the author, is basically evil. He has decided in advance who will get saved and who will burn in molten sulphur for all eternity, so his, and not the sinner's, is the responsibility.

Note that I am a determinist myself, and quite convinced that the state of the universe plus the laws of nature 'predetermined' my 'fate' a long time ago. But there is still a moral difference between a determinist-materialist view of the world and a supernatural puppet-master view of it, and it is the difference that counts for most of us humans. In the former case, we are part of a net of cause-and-effect, but crucially there is no other person controlling us except us; we still have agency, and if something bad happens it is either our (personal or collective) responsibility or nobody's. In the latter scenario, we are, crucially, merely puppets of another agent who has decided every outcome in advance, and even our greatest crimes, failures and sufferings are his responsibility alone.

Again, how can you worship a torturer and tyrant like that?

Next time: the fourth page, which deals exclusively with the Mark of the Beast.