Thoughts of a Freethinker

For centuries, humans have studied and debated mythologies. In general, I suppose, the most common conclusion has been that "My god is real, your god is a myth." Interest in this is so intense there is an International Association of Comparative Mythology. There is a wonderful article attempting to plot the various theories of mythology in the Oct. 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  For at least 100 years there have been scholars who think they discovered the original myths that later became Greek Gods and the Bible. So far, no theory about where or why myths appear has held up over time. I've written my own ideas about where various stories from the Bible came from. There are many stories and gods recorded from seemingly reliable sources that then later appear in the Bible. Three days comes up in older stories and then appears in various Bible stories. The dead hero who comes back to life is also a common one. That they were in earlier stories is not absolute proof that ...

  For years, several Christian pundits , both Catholic and Protestant , have crowed about coming growth of the faith, especially in China . With its vast population, one can see a small percentage of converts there would add big numbers. Now we are seeing this was and remains a mirage. China's leader has declared Christianity must preach (both in person and on line) a message in line with the message of his Party.  I'm not understanding the logic of spending money from collection plates on missionaries in China if the effort pays for Chinese Communist political messaging. Of course, those in the pews are told their money is saving souls. There is no way to compare times past with times present, but the impression one gets is that of murder and prosecution of Christians in many areas. I suppose there is also murder of other religions that is not covered by our media but the impression is there are lots of Christian victims.  There have been news stories for several ye...

Russell Moore was high in the Southern Christian organization before getting in some fights and leaving. Now, he is editor of Christianity Today. He wrote recently about a favorite topic of the Christian right, "revival." A Christian revival he said will not happen as so many Christian pundits predict or long for. It will happen, Moore writes, when there are believers who show up in church. Whether they show up, or do not show up, is not up to the church. He makes light of "a marketing strategy." Believers seem to just show up in Moore's world and are not the product of preachers or "the message." I think Moore's understanding has more intelligence than that of most Christian pundits. For example, how can we explain why the majority of young adults do not believe and simple leave the faith they were born into? There is no "marketing plan" by nonbelievers to force or attract these young people away. They just don't see anything there f...

Since I can't travel to meetings about religion it is fun the eve's drop on what goes on at them . Reading what religious writers write, learning what preachers preach, what academics are looking into, learning about the earliest 500 years of the faith and speculating on what those in the pews, who pay for all of the above, are thinking is a career in and by itself. All of these forces work against each other. The link points out that change, and challenging the status quo, is not only common in the faith but the reason the faith began. Jesus was said to challenge the "fathers" and "authorities" in the faith. Then, whatever was written or believed during the first 300 years was revised and pieced together by dictator Constantine's conference that cranked out the Nicene Creed. A hundred or so years later it was revised. Then that was soon criticized by the famous Augustine.  Until the 200 CE there was no vast hierarchy in Christianity. That was soon remed...

A survey by the Christian Barna group published the 40% number today. It was met by panic in high level Christian circles. In the comments of the article are men saying, (paraphrase) "I don't know any of these women," "My wife is happy in the church," and so on.  Every day there are articles, seemingly products of Christian PR sites, that tell of young, middle aged and old people returning to church. They tell of a survey or some church that is experiencing this. The stories never mention the unrelenting march out of the faith by young people. Each generation loses more than the previous one. This has been going on since before the year 2000. The link above is a reliable Christian site and shows the rapid exodus of Gen Z women. Gen Z are people under about 27 years of age.  This study asked respondents if they had lost interest in religion and in the ideas that fall under religion. I've noticed many surveys have big numbers of people who agree this is who th...

Rev. Rick Warren wrote a million seller, The Purpose Driven Life. I've never read it but I think it says your purpose is to believe what the church tells you and tithe to the church. A piece showed up on a Christian site which addressed the same question, what is your purpose in life? The way this question is asked within the faith, " What is  the purpose of your life?", implies there is a purpose. Individual people can feel they have a purpose but there is no proof there is some humanity-wide purpose. Because of that vacuum, the door is wide open for self-serving opportunists to slip into one's brain and plant some purpose. It is always to help the scammer. The notion that each of us can figure this out for ourselves if we are interested in this question is blasphemy.   Every reader knows how much the faith hates evolution. It is hated because a rational conclusion is humans are the result of events, not altogether random, but largely random. That being the case we h...

The Catholic Church has made some progress in preventing and reporting sexual abuse but is far from solving the problem. It admits the denomination is not accurately reporting cases in Africa and Asia. Certainly, the problem of clergy in protestant churches is just as bad and all of these problems in the faith are no worse than those in secular society. The issue of abuse in the faith is its claim of great moral and ethical superiority. It's just not there.  The Catholic denomination deserves credit for at least some openness about its shortcomings. There are still cases listed in the newsletter from Freedom From Religion Foundation. All cases cannot be eliminated. What could be eliminated is the pompous moral tone of the denomination. If it could grab onto the narrative, "We are human like everyone else, have faults and are trying to improve..." and leave it at that, abandoning its preaching on the morals of gayness, abortion and birth control, its future would be bright...

So far as I can tell, there is no legitimate argument within the faith to exclude women from the pulpit. I've heard many attempts to explain the prohibition. Catholics and their relative denominations like Missouri Synod Lutherans , have given several versions. The link spells of a common  Catholic one. All the explanations are almost silly. " Adam , a man, came before Eve ." " Jesus ' disciples were all men." Maybe Adam did not come before Eve, no one knows. And maybe Jesus' disciples were not all men. No one has ever written he/she saw either Jesus or his disciples. So, when I saw a title that implied a serious discussion of why women are not allowed, I jumped on it. The link claims male clergy was "given the church by God." To justify this outlandish claim he goes back to the male disciples . Even if there were disciples, which we do not know for sure, and even if they were all males, we don't have independent verification of that, w...

When Christian pundits lament the rise of liberal or tolerant views within the faith, they always blame someone other than themselves. Some blame parents. Others blame preachers. This is always amusing to me because neither parents nor preachers cause this slippage from conservative dogma against homosexuality and abortion. It is caused by the unbelievability of an ancient book and the relentless march of cultural change. For some reason, Christian pundits do not understand the business of Christianity. The business works like this: People in the pews hire preachers. The preachers they choose to pay will inevitably reflect the people who hired them. Those sermons delivered by the preacher were written long before by the people in the pews.  As the culture has moved through time, those in the pews have become more tolerant of gay people and of women who need abortions. As time continues, we can expect the culture to become increasingly tolerant of people who were born into one gende...

There must be some Christian preachers and politicians who are presenting the faith in a way that is attractive. These people give it hope for the future. One was the late Rev. Tim Keller , a Presbyterian , who held out-of-date views on several topics but didn't like the Christian right liement with Republicans. He was popular in a New York City church . On the other end of the spectrum are the likes of Franklin Graham . Currently, he about to start a money-making tour of England. One must put Graham in the list of blow-hards. So many of the classic evangelical blow-hards have been put out of business by scandals they are harder to find today. The Catholic Bishops who were loudest against abortion have been sent packing by Popes Fracis and Leo. Those in the Southern Baptist Convention have retired or largely lost. One that remains on Christian Post is Richard Land. He laments that times have changed and modern views are blasphemous. Abortion and gay marriage remain his enemies.  T...

Conservative Catholics can't stand it that Pope Francis and now Leo see  poverty existing beside wealth as a sin . Sin, the link will tell you, is abortion and gay marriage. Sin is hinting there might one day be acceptance of gay people in the church or women in the clergy. Where is the sin, conservative Catholics are asking, in  good old capitalism and some powerful bombs on non-Christians? The Trump Catholics live on. The link tells us Pope Leo is focusing on the wrong sins. In fact, poverty and people who are not ambitious enough to buy health care or housing are not part of any sin. The real sins bring in money and win elections.  Which will bring in more money, bill boards across the country with pictures of babies and the words "Abortion is murder" or bill boards with the message "We should end poverty?" Back when Pope Leo was a Bishop he spoke at a gathering where there were Catholic women. A woman ask him, "Has the time arrived for women priest...

Plenty of people who have read this decade-long blog will conclude I do not see "reality." What they see as reality are imaginary gods. What I write about here often is about other people who "see" things that are not reality. When did the practice of seeing things that are not reality start? There are theories that people who did not see reality survived better than those who saw it more clearly. We know humans evolved, apparently independently, in different forms and in different places around the globe. Artifacts have been found suggesting some branches of humans just died out, disappeared. There are anthropologists who conclude imaginary gods helped some groups survive. Years ago, I watched a documentary in which anthropologists traveled on foot with a group of native people whose source of food had gone away. The group was walking through brush and jungle looking for something they could eat. They were not finding enough and were running out of energy. The le...

  According to a poll referred to in the link , older members of churches are disappearing at a rapid rate. These are not ones who died. They usually are not people who complained about the church. They just stopped attending. The percentage is large. This puts to rest an old saw repeated in comments to this blog a while back. It was that the church's problem will be solved when young people marry and have children. When they reach that point in their lives they return to church and it once again thrives. Neither young nor old are returning. As one commenter to the link pointed out, old people (like me) are on the short end of time and should be the most interested in an afterlife. Instead, they deal with their coming deaths without the faith's goofy stuff. What is rather astounding is that pundits in the faith like the link author never bring up the possibility that one of the reasons the old are walking away is because they no longer believe. The link lists the reasons the o...

Trump seems to think he can will events to turn in his direction. Strategy and preparation are not necessary.  Let's start with grain . Many other places can sell grain to China . If China wants to buy grain other places it can. Now that is exactly what China is doing. Why couldn't Trump see that coming? There is lots of access to rare earth metals . We have them in the U.S. But processing them is very dirty. We didn't want the pollution. China doesn't care about the pollution and is the only country now where they are available. Considering the environmental damage done by the processing, we may be getting a bargain by paying China monopoly prices . China, however, can cut us off. That is what they are threatening to do. Why couldn't Trump see that coming?  If Trump were smarter, he would have done with rare earth, and perhaps some other goods, what China did with soybeans : have an alternative place to sell soybeans if China stops buying. Trump is not smart enou...

Maybe sin the beginning of governments there have been leaders who "sent in the troops." One can see troops are often props in the political movie. President Lyndon Johnson did it in a fictious event called the " Gulf of Tonkin ." W. Bush sent troops into Afghanistan mostly for political reasons and Iraq followed. Troops in Iraq, as we all know, were to locate and destroy "weapons of mass destruction." They never existed.  Now, President Trump thinks he is scoring political points by sending troops all over the place. The Republican Governor in the state where I now live, Iowa , sent troops to the border under the illusion more troop were needed. I read the border was already fully staffed. The troops from various Republican governors did school room visits with kids in rural Texas .  The current political theater is sending troops into cities with Mayors who are Democrats . This has included cities in Oregon and the C ity of Chicago . While I believe...

An executive in the AI industry told a conference of Christians AI will grow Christianity in many new countries around the world. He said the ability of AI to translate the Bible into languages which have never had such a translation will be like the Guttenberg press put the Bible into mass production.    I think the guy is promoting his business and career more than prophesizing a big future for Christianity. If young people today, born into Christian families, are leaving the faith why would the Bible appeal to those who have never heard of it? There is a lot of AI hype out there and this looks like some of it. The cell phone allowed young people around the world to learn about Christianity. But the young people also looked up sites critical of the Christian message and a huge proportion today have left the faith. It seems to me AI will be used by both the faith and its opponents to promote both views. To assume the faith will win is not what data tells us. One of the commen...

Maybe the biggest is ever could be given an award as the "bestest sin." I don't know what the besterst sin ever might have been or might be today. The really BIG of any time is soon replaced by some newer or shinier sin. Ever reader knows the current top sin, the one pointed to by holier than thou politicians and preachers is trans. While trans has been around since the begging of humans, it had a hard time making onto the sin leader board. Other sins wanted to hang on to their high status for as long as possible and kept trans from reaching the top.  I would guess interracial marriage stayed on top of the sin leader board in the South for 400 years. Probably that is a record among sins. Just that longevity itself should lead to the award of bestest sin. But, we all know, it slipped so badly many do not remember it was once even sin. We've had some sins in recent decades that did well. Gay marriage stayed at the top for a decade or two. Now it has slipped off the lead...

  I've read that there are right wing Christian groups telling President Trump he must support Israel's scorched earth policy on Gaza. The groups are telling President Trump Israel must have sovereign rule over the area because God gave it to them.   Certainly, at least some Jews have lived there since recorded history began. But, Jews could not have lived there before there was a Jewish religion. Islam is even newer than Christianity but its true Muslims have lived there along with Jews since early Islam. "The land of Israel" is a piece of land that was inhabited by many groups long before the Jews and Muslims. We can't be sure who all the groups were. From this distance, a "Two State Solution" does not seem like it would automatically stop some groups in each camp to stop shooting at each other. The current situation of Israel putting the hammer down of their enemies is not working so maybe Two States is worth a try. One thing for certain, Israel canno...

In the annals of history, unexpected and quirky things happen. Sometimes the blame for these is wrongly placed and is hard to correct. One of those is what we normally call "the economy." Before the great depression of the 1930's, the narrative about how things were going in "the economy" was mostly local. The country was largely rural and how things were going in your community was attributed to the local county officials. There were "county farms" for the destitute and churches looked after people. I remember my farm wife grandmother saying she would make a plate of food for some who knocked on the door and were hungry.  Then Roosevelt came along and told people he would help them. This (and perhaps other things I don't know about) helped change the narrative. "The economy" became the responsibility of the President and Congress. Yet, it has never been completely true that they are the reason times are good or times are bad. "The e...

While I'm not a Catholic, I understand there are two broad categories of interest within the denomination. One is individual morality. That refers to birth control, abortion and homosexuality. The other is social justice, treatment of the poor and marginalized. Senator Durbin has been an advocate of the latter. He has supported abortion rights and is disliked intensely by the other faction.  He was offered an award for the latter by the Chicago diocese but declined. The link criticizes his ever being offered the award but admits Catholics on either end of the spectrum pick and choose and are not consistently in one camp or the other. As a metaphor, he says both choose from the cafeteria. I think the late Pope Francis realized that as we move through history, life gets more and more complicated. The simple rules of long ago no longer work. His solution inside a vast enterprise was to not discuss complex matters such as the two factions in his denomination. He, it seems, came from th...

The word "narrative" is a wonderful modern communication tool. The old narrative about a decline in church was that young people branch out for a while and aren't involved in church life. But then they marry, have children and return with enthusiasm. The new narrative is they are not returning and, with a few exceptions, this is happening in all religions and in nearly all countries.  That statistics and observation confirm this exodus of Christians from the faith is still denied. Today there was a news post on a Christian site telling of a huge teen turnout at an anti-abortion rally. Teenagers with there expenses paid to another state while getting a vacation from school does not seen like a reignited religious movement. But it was reported as such. It baffles me that facts of the ground, people leaving the faith, are denied and a replacement narrative, one of "revivals", is believed. Not only it is incredible, it is frightening.

For so many years since the decline of religion started there have been press stories saying that people left religion remain "spiritual." The religious press glops onto this and says, "See, the public really has not changed at all. It is just as religious as ever. Those who are confused will return to the church soon." Church data tell us the decline has continued regardless of prayers for "revival" or false hopes the public would return. Now, a survey finds those who call themselves "nones" and who may refer to being "spiritual" really have little use for religion. They have lost interest in both organized religion as in churches and any other private religious views. They have simply walked away, seemingly never to return. The favorite word the Christian right uses to describe nones is "confused." If you as anyone at the circle of atheists I attend you will not find a single person who considers herself confused. It is, ins...

Women who give inspirational talks to other women are not part of my experience. But reading about them, what they have experienced and how they navigate the world is both interesting and important. As the majority of children born into the faith leave it, the role of their mothers is something to learn about. One woman referred to often as an "influencer" is Jen Hatmaker. She writes best sellers and is a presenter at conferences and remains very successful. She was a deep Christian but not has all but left the faith. Hatmaker and her preacher ex husband adopted several children from another country. Then he cheated on her and they divorced. All of her life up to that time was that of a devoted Christian. She worried about the future of the faith and felt a responsibility to evangelize.  Several years have gone by and she has experienced a different life than she anticipated as a young woman. Now she seldom attends church and feels no need to help the faith save itself. She h...

A drag show created and performed on the campus of the Un. of Nebraska was criticized by the local Neuman Center priest, some Catholic Students and another local Catholic clergy or two. It was created as a gay/trans right project incorporating academic and religious study of gay discrimination.   The University President apologized to those who were offended by the word "Mass" in the work's title. He promised to take the matter seriously and see that such offensive performances are not done on the campus. To this end, he promised to refer the issue to a panel of community and academic leaders who would develop a policy which would be used in the future to decide what material could be presented. The esteemed panel was to have started its work by the end of summer. The link author inquired around campus as to what has happened to esteemed panel project. He found no one who would say anything has happened or the any such work is under way. There seems to be no such discussi...