Refutations of Evangelical Christianity

Refutations of Evangelical Christianity, in short

Invisible Interventionism

Consider the following statements:
(D) God really intervenes in the life of authentic Christians according to what they testify; this produces effects which really make this life and this testimony different compared to what would produce without divine intervention the only natural effects of this doctrine by the social and mental mechanisms of man placed in such a cultural context.

(P) the Gospel is provable.

(T) the Gospel is true

Usually, Christians claim that (D) is true and (P) is false. This strongly suggests that (T) implies ((D) and (not P)).

Anyway, one can easily check that (T) implies (D) : indeed, the Gospel of John (15) insists thereon with the history of the vine and branches which finishes by "apart from me you can do nothing", as "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit ; By their fruit you will recognize them. "(Matthew 7). This concept "to bear fruit" should thus have the decency to appear concretely. And other gifts of the Holy Spirit. So many times the Christians repeat that an authentic Christian life requires a constant help or "revelation" by God, that faith itself would be impossible if it is not the work of God, that they do not base their positions and their life on their own thoughts but on the Spirit of God. Thus they claim that the purpose of Christian life would be to always go back unceasingly and more and more under the effective and spiritual dependence of God. They claim to rely on the constant and entire dependence of God, and to consider it effective and essential, so much that they do not mind in all good conscience to coldly accuse whoever would dare to complain about a defect of help or inspiration by God to his life that the Christian doctrine promise, to be a rebellious mind who did not have the humility to offer himself suitably and completely in the hands of the Lord. Such a vision is obviously not compatible with the idea of a God who would never take anyway the trouble of raising the small finger to guide his flocks.

Does (T) indeed imply (not P)? That does not appear clearly at all while reading the Bible. But, that reached such an universal agreement in the Christian population that to try to contradict it would be quite a tough job. One can notice something of very curious there: the Gospel grants a very high moral value to the fact of believing without having seen any proof. In spite of that, the evangelic Christians continuously deploy their evangelisator zeal to try to bring people evidence for the Gospel (even false ones, or rather in practice, always false ones but taken for true) to carry them to believe in it. They regard even that as the supreme mission of man in front of God. According to the Gospel too, the Christians are the light of the world which shines in darkness. Consequently, if (T) were true, then Christians would have all the sufficient light to find proofs if there were some, and by their evangelisator duty it is clear that if ever a proof existed then it would be known of all. But not only it is not the case, but if it were, that would destroy the supreme value promoted by the Bible which glorifies the fact of believing without proof. Thus (T and P) almost has a consequence refuted by facts; but even if we assumed the contrary, that would imply that the project of the Gospel is self-destroying, therefore an absurdity (in other words (T) is rather false; from where comes that (T) still implies not (P)) and that man does not need the assistance of God to convert to the Gospel since the reason suffices, which somehow would pose problem with the theorem (T implies D) shown above, or more precisely with the direct claim of Christians who say that faith is the work of God. (Possibly, one could still consider that the Christians know evidence and refuse to give it out so that faith will not rely on it; but it would be strange to practise such a retention of information by hiding the evidence of the veracity of the Gospel, thus presenting it as "less true" than it is, with the risk that the others are deprived of the chance to believe in it; it does not seem to me that many Christians adopt this attitude!)

Therefore: (T) implies ((D) and (not P)).

Problem: (D) almost implies (P). Indeed, any intervention of God in Christian life which has indeed an influence on this life and its testimony, constitutes (by its manifest effect which is indeed included in the statement (D)) a proof that this life is not the pure fruit of the only natural effects of the Christian doctrine by the purely human mental mechanisms inside this cultural context.
Precisely: (D) expresses the existence of a proof that

((T is true)
or (God lies to man)
or (God is crazy and does anything without any decently coherent purpose)
or (Some joking spirits of beyond have the power to intervene with the authentic Christians in a way similar to that which could be the true work of God but to transmit a false message)

or (God acts while leaving man free of his thoughts so much that the mechanisms of human thought who has taken himself the decision to believe in the Gospel, has the whim to want to interpret this intervention of God as being a confirmation by God of the veracity of the Gospel whereas in fact God has this way by no means supported any opinion on that question)).

Let us interrupt the proof here.
Notice the irony of the above observations. I did not even refute the Christian position. Quite to the contrary, I just introduced into the last formula some possible suggestions of ideas that Christians never thought of, who are absolutely inadmissible and unthinkable for them unless constituting mortal dangers for the survival of their faith, but whose presence (I mean the presence of these ideas as possible thoughts, not a priori as truths) is the single possible escape from the clear and obvious refutation of their position. In other words, I save the defendability of their position against them, but provided that the knowledge of what saves them of their dunce's cap never has the misfortune to cross their mind, unless they would be annoyed and run the danger to leave their position. But, shouldn't one decide whether or not one of these escapes can be seriously considered ? Does the only defense by the non-Christians to refuse the Gospel really rest entirely on the presence of these logically coherent logical alternative possibilities of these unjustified beliefs, one of which they would hold as true, while the Christians would hold them as false? In this case it would be here the starting point of all the disagreement between Christians and not-Christians, and it is strange that nobody yet had the idea to start a debate on this question.

On the other hand, by this argumentation I also offer Christians a gold chance to achieve the goal of their life, that is, to express to non-Christians an illusory proof of the veracity of the Gospel, and this in a manner which perfectly fits with their usual mode of argumentation. Namely, it suffices to take the above reasoning based on the examples of observations of D (their testimony) in the existence of which they believe so strongly (as they support that D is true, they should not complain about the difficulty has to find some) and to conclude by the argument above for (D implies P) while carefully overlooking my suggestions of possible escapes from this proof. They also just need to carefully forget the proof of (T implies not P) above (not awkward since (not P) is not really a biblical statement). This would achieve their holy duty of evangelization by giving the illusion of a proof by lack of imagination. So, what could they still complain against in my contribution?

But now, let's complete the proof:

If the Gospel were true and if in their divine wisdom the Christians knew how to deploy the best means to save souls, they would have been aware by themselves of the means above, and they would not have missed to hold up this illusory proof of the veracity of the Gospel. But they did not do it. So it means they could not do it, in other words they were unable to find some clear effects of the works of God in them. Thus (D) is false, therefore (T) is false.

This refutation above is already very satisfactory, and could be enough. There would hardly need to add anything to this proof to complete it and ensure the validity of the conclusion. So the goal of the other developments here is mainly educational: it aims to help think and understand precisely which are the multiple faults and hidden perversities of this doctrine. It also aims to explain by which mechanisms of fallacious thought Christianity functions and manages to give to so many people the illusion of his veracity, despite all its faults and its deep vacuity.

In addition, in contrast with inconsistency of (T) highlighted by the above reasoning, I bet I can successfully defend indefinitely (and the other texts here contribute to it) the validity of the following statement like a clear and coherent vision of the world compatible with the above theorems (as (T) implies (D) which implies (P) which implies (T) which implies (not P), it rises inevitably that (T), (P) and (D) are all three false), and who resists the experience (as I orally did before writing it, against authentic Christians on their various arguments and testimonies they thought they could put forward to defend their faith):

The life, testimony and the argumentation of "authentic Christians" are in exact conformity to what would be the natural behavior of man placed in the same context, without any divine intervention but only possibly some occational intervention of spirits from beyond, more or less joking, good or bad and of various personalities, some of which pretending to Christians their interventions are those of the Holy Spirit, and others are treated as demons by these same Christians. But anyway, none of their contributions brings any really deep spirituality, great morality, wisdom, mark of mirific omniscience nor any other divine plan whose effects are to be expected from a self-respecting God. Also, the appearance on Earth of this same cultural framework of appearance and success of the Gospel is perfectly explainable by mechanisms of the same style.
(Moreover, I would say that there is truth in the ideas of the loopholes above, except the first one of course)
And since they are the same, they do not need a different circumstance (intervention of God) to be realized. Thus Christian life is a life without God.

The non-revealing revelation

We can observe that, despite the millions of Christian testimonies of personal relationships with Jesus,

Nobody could ever guess anything of what is written in the Bible without having read or heard those elements by their ordinary senses (cultural transmission);
Nobody could ever receive a spiritual inspiration of any further detail about the life and teachings of Jesus, that was not already written in the Bible, and that could be independently discovered by others, or be confirmed by anybody by any other method than the blind faith to humanly transmitted information;
Nobody could provide any clarification, correction or completion, of any information in the Bible, about what may be not clear, incomplete or with contradictions on details between different verses, by any other means than the intellectual one, in ways that could be independently, regularly confirmed by other Christians based on similarly spiritual methods of enlightenment
The same spiritual experience of "personal relationship with Jesus" has already led many people to hold as divinely inspired, several quite different sets of books (bibles). The first examples were at the birth of Christianity with its many heresies that could only be eliminated by the force of mass murder or other pressures. A more recent living example is Mormonism (as I can witness that some Mormons I met, did have the same amazing spiritual experience of divine serenity and personal relationship with Jesus, as so many other Evangelical Christians).
Nobody ever received either from Jesus nor from any other spiritual source, any revelation of an information that may help the police to discover the location(s) where any abducted women were kept and regularly raped. The usual Christian argument about the world going wrong and God not fixing it, is that troubles are man's fault, and that God respects our freedom and won't make us any violence to turn us back to the right path. Question: would the respect to the abductor's freedom to keep raping these women, or the police's freedom to ignore the information on these locations as long as they cannot find it themselves, be such a paramount value in God's eyes, that He must forbid Himself to "intervene" in human affairs through any such revelation ? Or would any such concerns be too futile and lowly material for God to ever bother about that, as compared with the higher value of secretly revealing to a few devout people what is the right way to worship Him or to have faith in Him, so as to better lead them to eternal life ? See more such remarks

From these observations we can logically deduce that

The precise set of contents of the Christian doctrine is propagated as a mere cultural phenomenon, a rumor whose belief is only based on trust to humans channels of information, that is not spiritually linked, determined or confirmed by any "spiritual experience" of "personal relationship with Jesus" or any sort of divine inspiration or intervention whatsoever;
Any claim by Christians that their "personal relationship with Jesus" makes them witnesses of the truth of the Bible, either in its spiritual or historical aspects, is clearly mistaken.
Their claim of the presence of a sort of spiritual, personally experienced evidence for the truth of something, that does not have a mental nature and thus cannot be shared so as to convince other people by rational means, while it did seem an a priori reasonable and expectable possibility in principle, turns out to be quite naive and cannot resist futher examination of its applicability for the particular situation at stakes here, which it cannot properly account for. Indeed, intimate relationships by millions of people with such an extraordinary being as God, with all the actions, revelations and inspirations they attribute to Him and all the wisdom He is supposed to have, could not decently have stayed without overwhelmingly undeniable, visible, rationally demonstrable consequences (that would at least prove that there is something extraordinary at stakes here), which were not found. Thus they are putting forward a false argument when they excuse the absence of scientific evidence for their creeds in this way.

The Divine Duty to Tell Fallacies

A pillar of faith is the duty of evangelization, by use of a set of arguments presented as the basis of faith, reasons according to which one believes, and held for the truth of God. However, it can be observed (see the various arguments on this site or others...) that at least 80% of these arguments are fallacious, while the value of the other ones seems a priori difficult to determine. If it were about anything else, the fallacious arguments could be neglected in favour of those which are more solid, and the conclusion could still possibly hold. But here the problem is that the discussion is an integral part of its own object, which is to determine whether or not, the evangelic Christian thought is in conformity to the Godly truth, to which it is the duty of man to adhere. But with no need to examine the rest of the arguments, we already know that this thought is based on, and requires to regard as the thought of God to proclaim to all as such, pretending that everyone is also required in front of God to adhere to it, a set of arguments of which at least 80% are fallacious. However it is obvious that such a set of arguments cannot reflect the thought of God, and that a God who would require that we adopted such a way of thinking, arguing, convincing and behaving, cannot be worthy of respect. Therefore the conclusion is false, and this so-called requirement of God to try to convert the others to such a fallacious way of thinking by all means in order to save their souls without worrying whether the arguments are valid or not, is one of the falsest and scornable things that can be.

Seriously: Christians are representatives of a heavily organized community of millions of people who give their life to God and to work on finding the best arguments for their side because this is the only goal of their life to fix all arguments for their side. In addition to this they claim that all this community is inspired by God or the Holy Spirit to do this, so that they have no excuse for committing any mistake or leaving any imperfection in their defense. But it is, by definition, not the goal of life of secularists to prove Christianity wrong, since they don't think Christians are in danger of eternal hell for having the wrong creed, and they have more urgent worldly missions to work on. And they have no reason to be interested in religious views and how it is possible to reply to it for the satisfaction of those mentally skewed Christians. So they have no reason to dedicate their energy to refute Christianity. So it is no surprise if secularist arguments against Christianity do not appear perfectly cleaned up regardless the truth of secularism. Meanwhile it is purely the personal problems of religious people if they don't get things right.

Which fallacies, you may ask ? Well, all Christian arguments I ever saw were fallacies. Winston Wu made a list of important Christian arguments to show their fallacy.

Some factual refutations, in bulk

- The history of Egypt showed that the Jewish people was never slave there. Similarly, Jesus did not exist in anyway close to what the Gospels say. His supposed teachings started to be written before him, his story was not confirmed by external sources (claims it was are controversial), and so many aspects of Christianity are an heritage from the many religions and philosophies present at that time and place. Their final version and selection was a result of revisions in the face of criticism, a late clean up from that mixture, too late and far away for having reasonable chances to be faithful to the supposed facts.

- Most Christians deny reincarnation. However reincarnation is a fact, with lots of evidences from past life memories, and also as mentioned in many NDE testimonies.

- Generally, Near death experiences most often tend to deny that one religion would be better than others. There are some exceptions but much more people seem to lose religious affiliation as a result of their NDE than get "confirmation" of one.

- The Christian doctrine claims that any act of not believing the Gospel, and more precisely the fact of ceasing believing in it after having believed, must obviously and necessarily be a choice and an act of unfaithfulness against God. Indeed whenever I try to discuss with any Christian they most of the time keep smashing me under their unshakable faith that it must absolutely have been my personal choice to reject Christianity, regardless my denial of this "explanation". They are visibly sure to know this (and many other things) about my life much better than I, and they remain absolutely, divinely insensitive to my testimony of the contrary:

that no matter my tries to keep and follow Christian faith, it harmed me and rejected me, and there is absolutely no way to find such a thing as a possibility to believe any longer this stuff which is so obviously wrong and harmful in my experience. It is on the contrary by a most renewed and expanded fidelity towards the truth, finally giving up any temptation to try to distort it by human desires, and instead authentically accepting truth as it demonstrates itself to be (and possibly, as strange or unpleasant as it can appear from expectations), that I recognize now that Christianity is a gross swindle and that I cannot honestly any more accept its lies.

Eventually I might consider having made the choice to keep faith in the path, but I see it now as a big mistake and not really free but a result of ignorance (lack of information on what is wrong with it) that I was in and which I consider as a breech of my freedom to be accurately informed of the evidence on what is true so as to not be led to any mistaken path.
This ridiculous reality denial by Christians, which is essentially equivalent to a denial of my existence (of what I obviously know about myself) clearly demonstrates that they are completely in the dark, wrong and clueless about life. Thus the Christian doctrine is false at least on this question - it is not just an accidental human mistake but a diabolically resolute and systematic refusal to be corrected on this point.

- More generally, I testify that the attitude of Christians towards those who do not think like them (whatever the attitude of the latter towards God, the truth or morals), often shows a great lowness of spirit: it acts in a way that has in practice an effect similar to a monstrous intellectual dishonesty (even if practised "honestly"). I in vain announce them that I have very solid and obvious evidence of the insidious falseness and the nonsense of their doctrine, which does not come from a "refusal to believe" from me but from an honest recognition of the experiment, obviousness and reality, in a manner much clearer and solid that all their testimonies and their so-called (or no so-called) arguments (I observe the vacuity of these "testimonies" and Christian arguments): that does not interest them. So, without taking the trouble to hear my position they answer only by contempt and all kinds of absurd charges proclaimed with the greatest tone of certitude. Clearly, the truth does not interest them. If I try to tell them this fact, they retort by their usual exuse: "the truth, we already have it !". Therefore, that cannot be discussed. (more precisely, as for all, they chose to believe that they had it...).
No, contrary to what some claim, such wrong attitudes are not simply the fact of some marginal "false Christians", or Christians having one moment forgotten their good principles. It is obviously a systematic Christian attitude of blindness, contempt and truth denial, characteristic of all the evangelic Christianity and indissociable of the very heart of its doctrine. (As I said to one of them: if one starts to treat as false Christians all those who practice such an insane attitude, there would remain only a few authentic Christians in the world and you would not be among them). This proves that the real effect of the biblical doctrine on those who adhere to it and try to follow it, is at the antipodes of all spirituality, all honesty, truth, humility, respectful comprehension of others, and of any respectful approach of God. Translated from French
See also Contradictions of spirituality

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