Interview with Richard Schoenig on Where Christianity Errs

[Internet Infidels]

Interview with Richard Schoenig on Where Christianity Errs

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Join Freethinker Podcast host Edouard Tahmizian and, for the second time, long-time Secular Web author Richard Schoenig for about half an hour on Schoenig’s (just published!) accessible yet wide-ranging <i>Where Christianity Errs: A Fair and Clear Philosophical Assessment</i>. The interlocutors canvass Schoenig’s research in the philosophy of religion, his deconversion from Catholicism, and the wide variety of topics covered in his new book, such as original sin, petitionary prayer, faith in the absence of evidence, how a loving God could send people to Hell, a secular take on the meaning of life, the relationship between Christianity and atheism, and even the relationship between Christianity and politics. Schoenig then outlines his argument that the denial of opportunities for salvation to large numbers of human beings amounts to compelling evidence against the existence of such a God before Tahmizian turns to his argument that if biblical hard determinism is true, God would be the efficient cause of the sin that all humans supposedly inherited from Adam and Eve, and that if biblical hard determinism is not true, God would still be the final cause of that sin, <a href="https://infidels.org/library/modern/edouard-tahmizian-the-origin-of-evil/">making God the ultimate source of all evil</a>. Next Schoenig outlines his Heaven World argument that he has previously defended <a href="https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard-schoenig-no-god/">in more detail on the Secular Web</a>. Tune in for just a small taste of the inconsistencies that arise when merely combining indispensable Christian doctrines!

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[Rickster]

I (Richard Schoenig) very much enjoyed the discussion I had with Edouard Tahmizian about my recently published book, Where Christianity Errs, A Fair and Clear Philosophical Assessment. If anyone has any questions, comments, or objections about anything in, or related to, the book, please let me know in this forum or, if you wish, email me directly at bbphiler@gmail.com. Note: the book is available at Amazon and other online book sellers--including an E-book version.

Where Christianity Errs contains 18 assessment chapters sorted into three parts. I’ll briefly sketch out the content of each chapter.

PART ONE comprises 8 chapters assessing a diverse set of common and important Christian beliefs and practices.

Chapter 1 argues that the many shortcomings of the crucial Doctrine of Original Sin, lead to the conclusion that Christianity can’t live with it and can’t live without it.

Chapter 2 analyzes petitionary and thanksgiving prayer. The conclusion is that both types of praying are innocuous but pointless.

Chapter 3 explains why Christianity’s indispensable claim that religious faith generates or confirms knowledge is demonstrably false.

Chapter 4 rebuts the contention that God doesn’t send people to hell. Rather, they choose to be there.

Chapter 5 shows how some popular versions of Christian salvation doctrine are flawed in so far as they support the contention that salvation can be guaranteed by killing innocent persons. Stay tuned for that!

Chapter 6 analyzes and contrasts the notion of the meaning of life from a Christian and a secular perspective.

Chapter 7 shows that the phrase “Christian apologetics” is actually an oxymoron, which is to say, it involves an implicit contradiction.

Chapter 8 comprises two subsections:

In the first, I respond to two occasionally heard Christian complaints about atheists, framed as questions, namely,

--why do atheists so often blame every evil in the world on God and
--why are atheists so often so angry with religion, especially with Christianity?

In the second subsection of the chapter, I argue that God, as described in the bible, has what seems to me to be a cringe-worthy and, dare I say it, creepy obsession with his own glory.

PART TWO comprises 5 assessment chapters dealing with issues of Christianity and morality.

Chapter 9 rebuts the Christian charge that atheism is flawed, perhaps, fatally so, as shown by the extremely immoral policies and practices instituted by infamous twentieth century atheists such as Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and the Cambodian Pol Pot.

Chapter 10 argues that, based on an analysis of a number of Jesus’s moral prescriptions in the Gospels, including four from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not the moral sage that Christians hold him to be.

Chapter 11 describes inconsistencies between the Christian moral condemnation of abortion and two other important Christian moral beliefs.

Chapter 12 explains and critiques what I argue is an unsavory alliance between a large segment of American Christianity and extreme political conservatism.

Chapter 13 shows how one can defend an objective view of morality that doesn’t involve justification from any religious tradition, including Christianity.

PART THREE comprises 5 assessment chapters addressing Christianity’s most important error, namely, its holding that the Christian God exists. Each of the 5 chapters presents a novel atheological argument, that is, one designed to show that atheism is reasonable. Although independent of one another, the five arguments in Part Three are offered as a strong cumulative case for the conclusion that it’s very unlikely that the Christian God exists.

Chapter 14 presents what I call the Argument for God’s Nonexistence from the Existence of Unfair Human Experiences.

The gist of this argument is that the fact that some innocent humans experience what might be called a “charmed life,” while other innocent humans experience lives that are “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is unfair to the latter group and constitutes sufficient evidence that God does not exist.

Chapter 15 presents what I call the Argument for God’s Nonexistence from the Existence of Unfair Salvific Opportunities.

The gist of this argument is that the fact that some humans have an easy path to salvific success, others have a difficult path, and still others, the overwhelming majority (some 97% in fact!) have no path whatsoever to salvific success constitutes sufficient evidence that God does not exist.

Chapter 16 presents a version of the Argument from Divine Hiddenness that I call the Argument for God’s Nonexistence from the Existence of a Divine Temporal Gap.

The gist of this argument is that the existence of a nearly 300,000 year period during which tens of billions of God’s human creations had no knowledge of his existence or what he wants from them is sufficient evidence that the Christian God does not exist.

Chapter 17 presents a version of the Argument from Evil (often popularly expressed as “Why do bad things happen to good people?”). I call my version the Argument for God’s Nonexistence from the Quantity of Apparently Unjustified Suffering.

The gist of this argument is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

The smoke in this argument is the enormous number of specific instances of apparently unjustified horrendous pain, suffering, harm, and premature death experienced by sentient animals during the last 500 million years and of humans during the last 300,000 years.

The fire is God’s nonexistence.

What makes my version of the Argument from Evil novel and powerful is my reasoned numerical estimations of just how many specific instances of horrendous pain, suffering, harm, and premature death there have been in the last 500 million years and how unlikely it would be that all those instances of pain, suffering, harm, and premature death would exist if God indeed existed.

Chapter 18 presents what I call the Heaven World Argument for the Nonexistence of God.

The gist of this argument is that God does not exist because this world does.

In other words, if God existed, he would not have created this world with its astronomical numbers of specific instances of pain, suffering, harm, and premature death highlighted in the previous argument. Rather, he would have created a world similar to what Christians claim heaven is like in this world.

Note that the 5 atheological arguments in Part Three can be adjusted to show the likely nonexistence of any deity who is said to be maximally powerful, knowledgeable, and good. Notably, this would include the God of Judaism and Islam.