Christian Humulity

Christian humility means believing that the entire cosmos was created just for you.

Elvish Irony

J.R.R. Tolkien explicitly stated that he wanted to create a new mythology for the English because their native mythology was so incomplete. He failed to realize that his beloved Christianity was the primary cause of the destruction of native English mythology.

Early evangelists destroyed sacred trees to prove the impotence of the pagan gods. They deliberately built churches on top of ancient temples. They turned the sylvan elves into demons and devils.

Christians succeeded in demythologizing the world and we have the environmental scars to prove it.

Scapegoat Logic

Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins. They believe that when the Romans publicly tortured and executed him, his innocent blood washed away the stain of sin. Paul states that sin came into the world by one man (Adam) and left through another one man (Jesus).

This is the logic of a scapegoat. A group of evil people will atone for their evilness by putting all of their evilness into an innocent creature and then publicly torturing and killing it. In scapegoat logic, performing an evil act is not evil.

Heraclitus wrote 2,500 years ago: "They vainly purify themselves with blood when defiled with it, as if a man who had stepped into mud were to wash it off with mud. He would be thought mad if anyone noticed him acting thus." (Richard D. McKirahan, translator)

Consider an analogy. Suppose that a violent street gang wanted to clean up. Instead of, say, giving themselves up to the police and accepting their punishment, let us suppose that they followed scapegoat logic. This street gang would publicly torture and kill an innocent person and claim to be cleaned of their wicked ways.

I will never understand scapegoat logic. I will never understand why otherwise intelligent people proudly carry the symbol of the public torture and death of an innocent man.

Jane Austen and Male Self-Control

Jane Austen describes a world that is strangely parallel to modern conservative Islamic societies: if a young woman has sex prior to marriage or even marries the wrong man, she brings shame upon not just herself but the entire family -- and that will ruin their chances to make it in society.

There are obvious differences, of course, including the costumes. Austen's women wear beautiful dresses that flaunt their cleavage. Conservative Muslim women hide their entire bodies, sometimes leaving only a slit to peer through from their burqas. Austen's Christians put their faith in male self-control, even if those men have been drinking. Muslims assume that men have no self-control, and so they ban alcohol and hide the women.

We in the west have inherited this tradition. Thousands of generations of men in the west have been told that they can mold their own character, and that doing so is important to yourself and to others. By contrast, Muslim men have been taught that they cannot control themselves. Furthermore, that someone else is to blame for their errors.

Between Epigrams and Essays

I think of an aphorism as between an epigram and an essay. In this, I am influenced by Nietzsche. As an angry young man, I devoured his books.

While I enjoy his attacks upon Christianity, I rejected Nietzsche when I realized that in his utopia, I would not be educated in philosophy. In the 19th century, Americans democritized public education through high school. In the 20th century, Americans democritized college education, even through the Ph.D. In Nietzsche's utopia, only the elite would be educated -- he rejects anything that elevates common people (Christianity, socialism, labor unions, democracy, etc.). My family would have had to remain farmers.

So, I rejected Nietzsche from self-defense. You may dismiss this rejection as "mere" self-defense, but isn't self-defense a rational thing to do?

Jesus says not to bother washing

Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs, and Steel about why Europeans infected Native Americans with deadly diseases rather than the other way around. Diamond writes about their close contact with domesticated animals, which Native Americans did not have. After thousands of generations, the remaining Europeans were tolerant of the germs and diseases that the domesticated animals carried while Native peoples were not.

Gregory Clark writes in A Farewell to Arms about the same issue and focuses his attention on the peculiar European habit of living above your fecal waste. This had the same evolutionary effect: only those who could survive this germ-fest lived to reproduce, thereby making Europeans in general more resistant to diseases that wiped out Native populations.

Both authors are afraid to look at how ideas influence behavior, and so they fail to understand why premodern Europeans had such negligent bathing habits. The answer is easy. Jesus says not to bother washing your hands before you eat since what goes into the mouth cannot defile you, only what comes out can do that. Jesus is following Plato and developing a metaphysics in which spiritual truths are divorced from physical reality.

Both Homer and Hesiod emphasize for ancient Pagans the importance of washing, especially your hands. Jews ritually wash their hands during Sabbath. Muslims ritually wash their whole bodies five times a day. Only Christians are allowed to be filthy; and, despite their howling rejection of evolutionary theory, being filthy gave Europeans the evolutionary advantage of being resistant to many dread diseases for the simple reason that those who were not naturally resistant simply died leaving only the powerfully filthy ones to conquere the world.

Christianity is not Democratic

Christians sometimes argue that since Christian values form the basis for democracy, a person cannot be a patriotic atheist. They argue that since God loves everyone equally, this equal value for everyone is the metaphysical basis of the claim that we are all equal before the law in a democracy.

This argument is based upon what Christians would like to believe about their religion rather than what is actually found in the Bible.

The Bible is full of words such as "master," "servant," "lord," "slave," "Caeser," and so on. The entire world-view of the Bible is of royalty and kingship, not of elected representatives and presidents. Jesus tells parables that instruct us to be good servants and obey our master. Churches regularly sing praises of Jesus as the "king of kings" and "lord of lords." There is not a single reference in the Bible to voting for laws, of universal suffrage, or of doing away with royalty. Instead, there is an overwhelming message of obedience to one's superiors.

There is a deeper reason why Christianity is essentially anti-democratic: Christians believe that they have the one true way to live and are eager to ensure that we all believe and live as they do. They divide the world into those who are right and those who are not. This is clear evidence that they really do not believe in the equal value of everyone. A democracy can only flourish when people agree to disagree and then try to develop a system of living together with their disagreements. Christians refuse to agree to disagree since they believe that they and only they have the one true answer.