Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat

Clifford Cook
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  • Christianity
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Ross Douthat wrote a book called Believe - Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This podcast reviews that book, page by page, to seek whether the arguments Ross Douthat makes for Christianity hold up to skeptical scrutiny. Can a Christian apologist withstand the critical review of a reader who doesn’t begin with the author’s Christian bias?

  1. 11h ago

    Christianity Is A Map Into Fantasyland, Ross Douthat

    Ross Douthat’s book Believe claims that it can offer a rational argument for belief in religion, but here on page 114, Ross Douthat is now arguing exactly the opposite. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by that, because in the second half of his book, Ross Douthat is trying to get you to become a conservative Christian, a Catholic specifically. He's trying to get you to join his religion. This is taking up half of the book that he promised would not be about promoting one religion over others. So much for honesty. Anyway, Ross Douthat starts on page 114 with the argument that you should join in with a specific religion, because a lot of other people have done it, qnd therefore, it must be a really good idea. No kidding. Here’s what Ross Douthat writes: “The better part of wisdom lies in assuming that the web,” the web of ideas within a religion, that the web, “evolved this way for a reason, that there's wisdom to be found in the crowd.” There's wisdom to be found in the crowd. Ross Douthat is arguing that you should join a specific religion that has a lot of followers, and you should do that because, well, everybody else must have had a reason for doing it, so therefore, it must be a great idea. Ross Douthat is saying, You know, if all those other lemmings are jumping off the cliff, yeah, you should do it too. This is a kind of argument that most people mature out of after they've left middle school. Let's say they're 12 or 13 years old. By the time you're that age, you should know better than just to follow along with the herd, assuming that everybody else must have a pretty good reason for doing it. In contradiction to that, Ross Douthat says, you should join a religion and a very specific one, because it's got lots of other members and it's got a long history, and all those other people must have been pretty smart, so you should do it too. We could spend an entire episode critiquing that. I don't think that you need me to do that. Instead, we're going to be focusing on another idea that's here on page 114 and 115 in Ross Douthat’s book. That is the metaphor of maps. Ross Douthat is arguing against the idea that you should just generally accept that religion is true without committing to a particular religion. He's arguing that religions are like maps. I’m going to read this part to you. “If you take the optimistic view that all the religious maps, or at least most of them lead to the same destination in the end, lots of people who are moderately favorable to religion, but disinclined to pick one faith and stick with it, offer this justification for their dilettantism. But it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Suppose you were in Bangor in 1887, and you wanted to reach Topeka, and you were told that there were five excellent maps, from very different map makers, offering very different itineraries, that would all eventually lead you from Maine west to Kansas. Would it make sense to say, well, since they all get you there eventually, I'm sure I can just draw my own map and get the same result.?Would it make sense to stitch pieces of them together, rejecting the boring or grinding parts of each root on the theory that this way, your journey would be nothing but fun visits to neat roadside attractions? Of course not. If you want to reach Topeka, the fact that you respect all the different map makers equally doesn't absolve you of the requirement to choose one to follow, to submit. This submission also doesn't require total certainty about the tradition that you're joining.” We'll go on to the next part tomorrow. This is really weird. What Ross Douthat is arguing is that the last thing you should do. If you're taking a trip, take a look at the places that you want to go, and then so long as those places are along the general route that you want to take, go to those places. Ross Douthat is saying not to do that. He is saying that if you're planning a trip, let's say between Bangor, which is a city in Maine and Topeka, which is a city in Kansas, you should not go to the places that you want to go that are between them. Instead, you should follow a route that has been set for you by a map maker, like a map maker would in 1887. The thing is, in 1887, when they made maps of the roads or the railroads, or maybe you want to go partially by boat on the Great Lakes, whatever, they weren't setting down prescribed routes that you must take between Bangor and Topeka. I don't think that there probably ever was a map that dictated, particularly how to get from banger to Topeka and then telling you which route specifically to go. That's not how maps worked back then. So, already the metaphor is falling apart. Mapmakers just provided maps of the country with, you know, some of the roads, not all of the roads. Here’s where you wonder if Ross Douthat has ever actually traveled using a map back before we had these phones, these smartphones with GPS systems. Do you know how people traveled around? They traveled around using a series of different maps. They would have a map for one state, and then they would have a map for the next state, and they would have a map for the next state. They would also have a map for the entire nation that you were in. Those different maps showed things at different scales. So, we didn't use one map. We used different maps, and often people would have a lot of different maps in the glove compartments of their cars. They would cobble their journey together from different maps, different routes. Then sometimes people would discover on the way that something happened, like a road was closed. Maybe a bridge was washed out in a flood, for example. So, we adapted, and we might have to go down to Pennsylvania instead of going through Ohio, or something like that. We’ll go ahead and take that route, you know, and we'll change. We will adapt to the circumstances so we don't get set to one specific route. It's really bizarre, this metaphor that Ross Douthat is using. He is ignoring the fact that everyone had glove compartments with different maps in them, many maps, all at the same time. Ross Douthat is also ignoring that people, back then before GPS devices, tpretty much just followed the roads and road signs. Road signs would tell you which way way to go. If you wanted to go in one direction in general, you would memorize roughly where the different cities and the different states were, and then you would travel down the road and you would get these signs saying it's this many miles to this city, and then they would say, hey, we're going to have a split here in 10 miles, and if you want to go toward this city, go on this part of the road, and if you want to go on to this other city, take that part. People wouldn't even use maps all the time. People would just kind of pull off by the side of the road and ask for directions. They'd say, “How do you get from here to there?”They'd ask someone locally who actually knew the landscape. “What's the best place, the best way to get from here to there?” So, in actual fact, people didn't always rely on maps. They used multiple maps when they had to. They relied on their own observations of the landscape, rather than being dependent on paper maps in the way that we are dependent upon GPS. I think Ross Douthat when he's writing this, publishing it in 2025, is depending on younger people's ignorance of how using maps actually works. The metaphor just doesn't work. It's not plausible, the idea that you have to submit to one map and one map, only by one map maker, and you have to stick with that one. And that's his metaphor for religion, that's why you have to stick with one religion, and you can't just pay attention to what's going on with different religions. The metaphor fails, but also, he's talking about this in terms of religion. Religion is all about, it claims to be about, Christian religion in particular, getting you salvation, which means that God won't torture you. This is a religion that believes that the default is that God wants to torture you. The creator of the universe hates you, despises you, thinks that you're filthy and awful, just because you're a human being. By the way, the same religion says that God was the one that created people, the way that they are. Oh boy, that's sadistic, but okay, let's put that little moral caveat to the side. So the whole idea is that Topeka, the city of Topeka, Kansas, in Ross Douthat's metaphor, is salvation, and God sees that you've been working hard and trying and you've been staying to the one true path, the one true path between Bangor, Maine and Topeka, Kansas. Now you have arrived by that one true path, the one road that's the right road when all other roads are wrong and sinful, and God hates them. When you get to Topeka, yay, you are at one with God, and God shows up and he's there, and he loves you, and everything's great. Here's the problem: No one has ever been to that kind of place and provided any evidence of it. Nobody has ever been to that Topeka. Nobody has ever been to God, arriving at the destination and taken a photograph of God, or a movie. I mean, we are all carrying these phones around, the smartphones have cameras in them, so, we can take video of God. We could take photographs of God, right? Why does no video or photograph or God exist, then? No one has even gotten like a toenail clipping of God as some kind of evidence that, yes, God is at the end, the destination. Instead, We have a complete absence of the idea of this Topeka actually existing(Topeka being God, and salvation by God). There's no evidence that this place actually exists. It's not like a map from Bangor, Maine to Topeka, Kansas. It's more like a map of how to get from the city of Bangor Maine, which we know exists, and that's where we are right now, Bangor being reality, and everybody's been there, and there are postcards, and there are books about Bangor main, and there are movies and all kinds

  2. 1d ago

    Violent Demands To Close Our Minds Are Not Rational, Ross Douthat

    The further you read in Ross Douthat’s book Believe, the worse it gets. In chapter 4, Douthat is now making unsubstantiated claims that people should be tortured if they don’t close their minds and fully commit to believing the right religion. Douthat also cites a chapter in the violent Book of Revelation that was used by Nazis to justify the genocide against Jews under the Third Reich. Do you still think Ross Douthat is a reasonable moderate? Podcast Transcript Thank you for coming back to listen to another episode of Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that is examining one book. That book has the title, Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Everyone should be the same? That’s quite a claim. So far, the author of this book, Ross Douthat, does a terrible job at his attempt at rational justification for religious belief. At every turn, Ross Douthat is engaging in sloppy thinking, engaging with only the facts that suit the argument that he's trying to make. He makes assertions without backing them up. He profoundly misunderstands science and misrepresents it over and over again. We are now past Ross Douthat's attempt at providing a rational basis for belief in religion. He has completely failed to do that. What Ross Douthat is doing at this part of the book, we are on page 112… If you happen to have a copy that you got out from the library. I do not encourage you to buy this book. Get one from your public library. It's really not worth the money to buy a copy yourself. Anyway, the point is that it's at this part of the book that Ross Douthat he thinks that he's convinced people to become religious in general. So now, he's starting to tell the reader what kind of religion they should engage in, what they should believe in as a religious believer. Guess what? The religion Ross Douthat is going to tell readers they should choose will be Ross Douthat's own conservative Catholicism. His right wing Christian nationalism. It's not much of a surprise, is it? On page 112 of his book, Ross Douthat is beginning with what seems to him to just be a natural argument, but to any reader who is paying attention to what has been said, it comes out of left field. Ross Douthat started this book with the promise that he was going to be rational about this, but here in chapter 4, Ross Douthat is beginning to tell readers what kind of religion they should belong to. What he's saying is that you shouldn't be open-minded about it. Ross Douthat is saying that you shouldn't be open-minded. He writes: “Permanent open-mindedness is not necessarily a virtue. In the end, the meaningful life is usually the committed life. The dilettante's posture must yield at some point to the active choice. Better to face the consequences of even a mistaken commitment or decision than to hear, at the last, the fateful judgment, ‘because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.’” That last bit of what Ross Douthat wrote is a quote from the Book of Revelation, chapter 3. The Book of Revelation is the last chapter of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Why is Ross Douthat quoting the Christian Bible as evidence that you should believe in the Christian Bible? That's not rational. That's not logical. That's circular. This is where we see how far Ross Douthat has gone off the rails. The idea is that you should definitely commit to an idea, and that when you do, you should go all the way in. You shouldn't keep an open mind and continue to think about things and evaluate your life as it comes up in the moment. No, what you need is an ideology that you are committed to, and you can't be halfway about it. You can't just be lukewarm about that ideology. You have to be all the way in. Why? According to Ross Douthat it’s self-evident, because when you die, you're going to be judged, and you will be punished, if you don't belong to the right ideology. Whoah. Wait a minute. Where did Ross get that idea from? You know the answer. This idea of judgment and punishment after death comes from the ideology that he's already committed to. So, the ideology that he's committed to has told him, in the Book of Revelation chapter 3, that he must be absolutely committed to an ideology and close his mind to all other possibilities. His ideology says he'll be punished if he doesn't do that. Therefore, it must be true. I mean, Ross Douthat is saying it must be true because his ideology says it's true. What evidence is there, though, that when you die, you're going to be judged at all by anybody or anything? We have no evidence of that. Ross Douthat has not taken any effort really to prove that point. He says a little bit in the previous chapter about how sometimes, among the very small minority of people who, when they get very sick, have dreams that they categorize as near death experiences, and within that very small minority, the even smaller minority that has religious tones to the dreams that they have when they're very sick, within that very small minority of a very small minority, there are sometimes religious dreams that people have when they're very sick, close to death, and sometimes some of those tiny number of religious dreams contain a suggestion that people might be judged. So essentially, the closest Ross Douthat has come to a rational argument in favor of divine punishment after death is that in a very very small number of cases, people who are sick have reported having dreams in which characters say that there's going to be a judgment when we die. That's his evidence that we all need to live in fear that we're going to be judged by the Christian god if we don't believe with complete commitment. That’s all the evidence he has that when we die, we're going to be judged by a magical spirit who likes to punish people. That's a terrible standard of proof. That's not evidence. People have dreams of all kinds of things, after all. What’s more, a lot of Americans have been raised with the belief, and have been indoctrinated by adults when they were children to believe that death equals judgment, so you'd better obey. You'd better obey your parents, but even more importantly, you'd better obey the church. You'd better do exactly what the church says, and you'd better live your life according to the rules that the church puts down on you because if you don't, you'll be punished after you die. Ross Douthat was raised within that religion from his birth. The minute he could begin to understand language, his parents started to indoctrinate him in this ideology, taking him to church over and over again. It wasn’t a rational choice for him, to be indoctrinated in this ideology. In this book, Ross Douthat has not done a single thing to bring any non-believers along in any reasonable way to share his belief that something mystical happens after death. First of all, Ross Douthat fails to provide reason to believe that there is a soul at all. I haven't ever seen a soul. Secondly, Ross Douthat fails to show that any soul, if it does exist, will survive after death. Why should I believe that? I've never seen a soul that has come back after death to float around in my garage, maybe, and say, “Boo! Do you have any potato chips? Boo!” Nothing like that has ever happened. Then I'm supposed to believe, without any evidence, that I'm going to be punished if I don't agree with Ross Douthat? I'm going to be punished after death because I don't agree with Ross Douthat, and furthermore, that I if don't absolutely commit, that's a sin, a sin to to not go all in on an ideology and to close your mind? I mean, that's what Ross Douthat is saying. This is not rational. If you want to say that you are going to make a rational argument, and then in the middle of the rational argument, you'd start telling people that they have to stop thinking, I don't think you have any credibility. Ross Douthat is also arguing that to have open-mindedness is to be a “dilettante”. To that, I say, leave your French-derived fancy terms out of this. What are you actually trying to say, Ross Douthat, that there's some kind of decadence in keeping an open mind, that if you're so open that you refuse to commit with a fervent mind? Are you saying I should commit like MAGA voters have committed? Are you saying that if we're not like MAGA voters, supporting the fascism of Donald Trump absolutely, without thinking about it, closing our minds to any other possibility, were dilettantes? That's what Ross Douthat seems to be saying. It’s nuts. Ross Douthat claims to be a moderate, but then he accuses people of being dilettantes for keeping an open mind. I just don't get how people think that Ross Douthat can be considered to be a political moderate. Ross Douthat is encouraging the closure of minds. You know who keeps an open mind, lifelong, professionally? It's scientists. I don't mean to say that if you are not religious, you have to professionally become a scientist. I do think that there's more to the perspective of science than just becoming a chemist, a biologist, an astrophysicist, or something like that. There's more to science than that. Science is an attitude. It has at its foundation, an attitude of being willing to admit that you are wrong, being willing to consider new facts when new facts are discovered. When Ross Douthat says that you can't keep an open mind, that keeping an open mind is some kind of decadent indulgence, and it's impermissibly liberal, that’s the kind of implication of his use of the word “dilettante” there. He's saying that we should not have a society that's based on science, on facts, that we as a society should close our minds to new ideas and new information, because if we keep our minds open, we will stray off of the true path. Ross Douthat actually says that he's going for capital T truth here, in terms of which religion you have to belong to. I want you to think about what life would be like if

  3. 2d ago

    A Summary Of Ross Douthat's Failed Arguments For Religion

    As this podcast’s line by line, page by page examination of Douthat’s book shows, none of his arguments in favor of religion make any rational sense. So, an intelligent reader of his book must come to a conclusion that’s the opposite of what Ross Douthat thinks he has achieved. The rational choice, given Douthat’s multiple failures to justify religious belief, is to walk away from religion. This episode presents a summary of Ross Douthat’s arguments for religious belief in the book so far, and recaps the reasons these arguments are plainly absurd to any thoughtful person. And then what? We are now halfway through Ross Douthat’s book, and yet, we find that it’s at this halfway mark that Ross Douthat concludes his supposedly rational argument in favor of religious belief in general. What on earth is Ross Douthat going to do for the rest of this book? It’s been pretty obvious from the beginning. For the rest of the time, Ross Douthat is going to start attacking non-Christian religious, telling you why they are dangerous or deluded. It turns out that in spite of his promises at the beginning of the book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious is actually dedicated to promoting Christianity over both non-religion and non-Christian religion alike. Yes, Ross Douthat broke his promise, in the long tradition of dishonesty by Christian preachers. That’s just one more reason that not everyone believes. Christianity is thoroughly untrustworthy.

  4. 4d ago

    Ross Douthat Won't Face Facts Of Faith Healing And Near Death Experiences

    We're going to wrap up discussion of chapter 3 of Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. There's a whole lot of stuff and nonsense in here, including some stuff that's just sort of odd, very vague, difficult to understand, a lot of stuff where Ross Douthat never, ever appeals to evidence or facts. He just makes assertions over and over again. It's not a great chapter. It's not a rational chapter. We're going to cover two issues in this episode. I'm going to try to be brief about them, because it's just really upsetting, especially this first issue: Faith healing. Ross Douthat comes into faith healing on page 86 approximately, and he sort of smudges his way into it. He comes into faith healing by talking about the process for making Catholic priests or other people into saints because people have to say that they performed miracles, and usually these are medical miracles. Oh, I was healed of my sickness, right? Ross Douthat says that this is done in a very scientific rational way, the way that the Catholic Church identifies people as being saints, who have magical powers to heal people. I'm going to give you some of Ross Douthat's language here. “The Catholic Church, whose process of saint making depends on scientific investigation and a process of exclusion, to qualify for consideration, the illness that's been allegedly cured by a saint's intercession must be incurable, it must be documented by medical authorities. It must be organic to the body and not psychiatric. There must be no treatment that might account for the shift. The healing must be sudden and immediate, and there must be a full recovery.” Wow, that's scientific, huh? Is that scientific? You know what it doesn't include? It doesn't include any evidence that is concrete other than people say so, other than what people say happened, right? Any link between the actual proposed saint and the healing is not required in the process. Also not required is any description of the process by which this healing would have taken place. What is exactly the theory of how a saint heals a person? What is the mechanism for that healing? There's nothing there. Nothing at all about that, except, oh, the power of God did it. What is the power of God? What is the power of God?!? Is it electricity? Is it gravity? Is it uh, I don't know, does it have to do with quarks? I mean, what is the power of God? Catholics can't even define what God is in a scientific way, much less what a saint is and how their magical healing power works. If you don't do that, you don't even have a hypothesis that can be tested, certainly not one that can be tested across all of these claims of saintly healings. This is not a scientific process. It's a religious process, and it's a very politically influenced one, with people who are appointed by the Catholic Church, not medical scientists who are independent of Catholicism. This is not a scientific process. Let's talk about something else that Ross Douthat does not talk about when it comes to faith healing. He doesn't talk about how many kids it kills. How many adults it kills is also important, but let's focus on the kids because Catholics love to talk about pro-life stuff. How about pro life faith healing? Is faith healing pro life? Let’s talk about Idaho. In just one congregation of true believing Christians in Idaho, they call themselves Followers Of Christ. In just 10 years, 25 children in this one congregation died. They died, and they were never seen by a doctor. They died, and they didn't get basic medical treatment like antibiotics. Babies died. That happens a lot with faith healing. It happens a lot with families who decide that, given everything they've heard in church about the power of faith, they're just going to pray their children's sickness away. Over and over again, those kids die, or they get severely crippled by their diseases. They lead lives of suffering because their parents couldn't be bothered to take care of them. This Followers Of Christ congregation is in Idaho, where there is a law that covers everybody except for Christians. Under this law, it's a crime for families to neglect the reasonable medical treatment of their children. When their children come to harm because their parents are refusing to give them medicine, that is child abuse. It's a crime, unless you are religious, unless you say you did it because of God. The belief in God is responsible for the deaths of those children's, and it happens all across America every year. Death, death, death, due to faith healing. If Ross Douthat wanted to make a genuinely rational argument about faith healing and how it's real he would bring that up. If Ross Douthat wanted to talk about faith healing, he would talk about all of the hucksters who take money from people. They talk about Jesus, and they talk about God, and they talk about faith and prayer, and they have music playing, and they have people come down who have serious medical conditions, and they take their money, and they shake them around, and then they proclaim them healed, and then they get them off stage before anyone can see that they're actually not healed. It's a scam. It's a fraud. But guess what? It's protected by the 1st amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. You get freedom of religion. Freedom of religion sometimes is freedom to scam people, to exploit them, to shake down sick people of their money. Of course, Ross Douthat doesn't talk about that in his book when he writes about faith healing, saying it's part of the mystical numinous, woo woo everything. You want your kid to be without medicine? Let me tell you, almost all of the medicines that we've got, they were created by scientists, not by prayer. It's not prayer that saves your kid when they're in the hospital with a dangerous infection. It's not prayer. It's medical science. Faith healing isn’t all, though. Ross Douthat goes on to talk about something else in chapter 3. He goes on to talk about near death experiences. With near death experiences, you’ve got to ask: How common are those? This is not something that Ross Douthat talks about specifically. He doesn't cite any studies. There are studies, studies of people in Intensive care units, the units in a hospital where people really do get close to death. It’s always medical science that brings them back from the brink of death by the way. It's not prayer. It's not rosary beads. It's not holy water, shaken on you by a priest. It's medical frickin' science. For your near death experience, if you have a study where you prompt people and introduce bias into your questioning, you can get rates as high as a 25, 26, 27, 28 percent of people in the ICU, if they are asked, “Hey, did you have a near death experience?” they will go along with the bias of the interview and they will say, yes. Still, that's a minority. It's like, wow, 3 quarters of people don't have a near death experience. What's going on with that? Ross Douthat says it's because, because people are just too afraid to tell the truth about what's been going on with near death experiences because they're afraid that someone might sneer at them as scientists. A mean scientist might sneer. This is Ross Douthat’s excuse for whenever facts don't match his religion's reality. It's the fault of those mean scientists who are so nasty, asking questions. You know what? If you are a doctor in a hospital and you ask people about some really embarrassing stuff, like if you ask them about the color and the consistency of their poop, they will tell you about it. I mean, they might be a little hesitant at first, but they will tell the doctor about all kinds of embarrassing things. They will talk about their menstrual blood. They will tell doctors about the very embarrassing thing that they did to get themselves in an accident. These kinds of things are routinely reported in hospitals. But even when you have bias in your research with the direction of a closed-ended question, introducing the idea of near death experiences, it's only one quarter of people who even say under those extremely methodologically compromised circumstances that, yes, that maybe they had something. And by the way, what is a near death experience? It’s not necessarily seeing God. Most of the time, it’s more like, “Huh, I kind of did see a light when I was unconscious. Um, yeah, you know, I thought I heard music when I was under, or I heard somebody's voice.” Really vague stuff can be included in that category, right? There was another study that was a little bit more reasonable. It just asked people to tell the researchers about, “Hey, what happened?” It didn't ask, “Did you have a near death experience? Did you have, you know, one of these following things: Did you see lights? Did you hear music? Did you hear voices?” Did you have a dream essentially? That’s what a near death experience is. It’s a kind of dream people have while they were unconscious near death. You know how many people spontaneously reported having a near death experience? Four frickin' percent. Four percent, and that could include just something really not religious, like seeing lights or hearing sounds, right? Or it could be just the vague feeling a sense of peace and calm. An emotional experience could be part of that. So if you have only four percent 4% with any kind of near death experience at all, then actual religiously-themed near death experiences are going to be a small percent of that 4% of people. So if there is a god, and if this god appears to people who are near death or angels or whatever, if that's real, well, how come it's almost never ever happening? Ross Douthat writes throughout this chapter, as if religious near death experience is common. You would think it's happening all over the place, the way he writes about it, but it's not. Ross Douthat never cites the studies of how often it happens becaus

  5. 4d ago

    Sloppy Writing Isn’t Rational, Ross Douthat

    Chapter 3 of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious is full of factual errors and dishonest partial quotes of the sort that break trust with intelligent readers. Ross Douthat couldn’t even get the year of one of his favorite Catholic miracles right, and didn’t bother to do simple research into a well-known electrical problem that provides a rational, completely materialist explanation for spontaneously smoking bicycle lights. So far, Ross Douthat’s book is proving the incompatibility of religious belief and rationality. Podcast Transcript: Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast in which I read through a book by right wing Christian pundit, Ross Douthat. His book is Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I'm now going to focus mostly on page 84, which is still in chapter 3, The title of chapter 3 is the myth of disenchantment. However, I'm gonna reference really quickly, because it fits within the theme of this episode, something that I said, a few podcast episodes back. You see, I got something a little bit wrong. I didn't bother to check. I’m admitting that now. I should have checked what Ross Douthat wrote in his book, because he wrote that the Miracle Of The Sun, a supposed miracle which actually the evidence is very shoddy for, and was contradicted by thousands of witnesses, actually, this really non-miraculous miracle that Douthat believes is absolutely true, took place in 1917, not 1918. I’m finding this out because on page 85, Douthat refers to this supposed miracle, saying that, “official knowledge rules out legends or delusions, despite their evidentiary basis, like the miracle of the sun, in the disenchanted year of 1917.” The evidentiary basis of that Miracle Of The Sun is rotten, but yes, it did happen in 1917. Only, back earlier, going back a few pages toward the beginning of this chapter, Ross Douthat says it happened in 1918. It's a simple error, but it's a sort of simple error that you think would be caught by a guy who he has enough money to hire a good copy editor. But, you know, Ross Douthat is kind of sloppy in this book. You'll see a lot of things like that going on, a lot of sloppy reasoning as well as just sloppy, incorrect facts. A more conceptual sloppiness takes place on page 84, in which Ross Douthat is quoting an account by an anthropologist, whose name is Tanya Luhrmann. Tanya Luhrmann, you will learn if you look for other sources besides Douthat, has been funded extensively by the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation is a pro-religion foundation that is seeking to, how can we put this? Well, their euphemism is that they want to bring science and religion closer together, which it means you would have to make science religious because science and religion are not compatible. They're just totally different ways of thinking. The Templeton Foundation is historically a pro-religion foundation. Tanya Luhrmann wrote an article in the New York Times, which is probably one of the reasons that Ross Douthat is citing it, because New York Times writers tend to be heavily influenced by other New York Times writers. That's just how things go. Anyway, Tanya Luhrmann wrote an article that has a theme in common with Ross Douthat. That theme was that, gosh, sometimes really strange, unexpected things happen. What are you gonna do? Here's what she said in that article. I'm not going to read the whole story to you because it's kind of long, but essentially she was on an anthropological journey, which is, by the way, not science. It's social studies. I don't like using the term “social science” because social sciences are rarely truly scientific. Certainly cultural anthropology is not. It is a qualitative mode of investigation that describes things that go on, but it doesn't really perform science anyway. That's fine. I love cultural anthropology. It's fascinating stuff, but it's not science. So, Tanya Luhrmann was doing this project where she was going out to lots of religious communities and reading their books and seeing what kinds of cultural patterns she could find. She was on a train and she was reading a religious book. “The book's language was dense and abstract, and my mind kept slipping as I struggled to grasp what he was talking about. The text spoke of the Holy Spirit and Tibetan masters and an ancient system of Judaic mysticism called Kabbalah. The author wrote that these were all just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual reality into this one through the vehicle of the trained mind, and as I strained to imagine what the author thought it would be like to be that vehicle. I began to feel power in my veins, to really feel it, not to imagine it. I grew hot. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing, and then wisps of smoke came out of my backpack, in which I had tossed my bicycle lights, one of them was melting.” That's Tanya Luhrmann's story. Ross Douthat cites this story in terms of a category of mystical experience, that he describes as follows: “A mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality.” Ross Douthat is saying that what happened to Tanya Luhrmann, with her bicycle light melting and smoking in her backpack, was an example of “the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality.” Wow, that's amazing. I mean, a mystical experience that affects reality by causing her bicycle light to melt and smoke. What are the chances of that? Well, actually the chances of that are, you know, pretty common. If you do a simple search online, you will come up with a lot of stories about bicycle lights spontaneously melting, and smoking. One story is about a bike light exploding and causing a fire that guts an apartment. Another story says the plastic lens on my MagicShine RN 1500 is melting. Yeah, that MagicShine is a bicycle light. Another story from adventure writer asks, “Why would a tail light bulb melt?” Also along these lines, I found a good question down at Cafe Husky: “Anyone have a melting headlight like this?” At UK, Monster Owners Club Forum, someone notes, “I have just noticed that my brake light lens is melting.” This happens an awful lot, actually. If we take a look at a post from a Reddit user who owns bikelightdatabase.com, somebody who has investigated a lot of time researching bicycle lights, says, “I’ve been warning people away from the super cheap generic Chinese lights for years, but some people still insist they're a good value. I'd heard anecdotes about battery packs smoking. Although never a full on house fire like this, but now it finally happened.” Then somebody responds to that Reddit post saying, “While many major brands of all sorts of electronic devices have had many of these same issues with their lithium ion batteries, while the cheaper brands and off brands tend to have more problems, buying big name brands doesn't make you immune from them.” You get the idea here? Bicycle lights, and tail lights that use similar technologies, for mopeds and things like that commonly engage in spontaneous smoking and melting and even catching on fire. It's because of the lithium ion batteries and their interface with the electronics of the bicycle light. So it's not really a strange event. Ross Douthat doesn't include any of that context in his book. He doesn't include any research into what might be some perfectly rational explanations for a bicycle light beginning to smoke and beginning to melt inside someone's backpack. If you talk to bicyclists, you'll find that this is a quite expected thing that can happen, and they talk with each other about how to avoid this kind of problem. Ross Douthat doesn't provide that rational explanation. He just decides that it's the mystical experience, breaking through and affecting physical reality. What is the implication of what Tanya Luhrmann wrote? The implication is that she started thinking about, just thinking about what it might be like to be a vehicle for a higher spirituality, to be that kind of trained mind, and then she started feeling power in her veins. She says she started to “feel it, not imagine it”, but okay, let's think about this now. What is the difference between feeling something in your body and imagining it in the sense of power in your veins? What does power in your veins feel like, and how is that different from imagination? How do you know if you're imagining that or not? She writes that she started to get hot, but then, of course, she was sitting right next to the batteries that were getting quite hot as well. Look, right there in the beginning of the paragraph I just cited, and you’ll see that Tanya Luhrmann's experience couldn't possibly be what the mystical gurus who were writing the book that she was reading were talking about. She says that the author wrote that “these were just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual, spiritual reality into this one through the of the trained mind.” She writes, “I struggled to grasp what he was talking about.” Right there, we see that Tanya Luhrmann is not a highly trained mind in this sort of thing. Yet, the author of the book she was reading is saying, well, this kind of spiritual experience can only happen to those people who have a trained mind. Tanya Luhrmann was not a trained mind. She was reading this book for the first time. So, how could she possibly have been channeling these magical higher spiritual kind of powers? It's actually against the very religious woo woo doctrine that she's reading about. Ross Douthat doesn't talk about that. He doesn't talk about the blatant contradictions within Tanya Luhrmann’s account. There's another thing, Ross Douthat doesn't talk about how in the very same article written by Tanya Luhrmann t

  6. 5d ago

    Questioning Religious Authority Isn't Embarrassing, Ross Douthat

    Ross Douthat says that people, when they have religious or supernatural experiences, they are… “…embarrassed to talk about their experiences at all, since they assumed that doctors and psychologists would sneer at them. That embarrassment is itself a key feature of our times. Yes, there is some natural human eagerness to believe in the supernatural, some persistent fascination with the marvelous or eerie, but as Official Knowledge has marginalized the mystical, that eagerness coexists with the opposite sort of pressure to dismiss supernatural experiences, even one's own supernatural experiences, lest one appear deluded or disreputable.” Ross Douthat goes on to talk about how Official Knowledge just doesn't allow any space for the supernatural, or religion. Poor, poor religion just doesn't have any space, he suggests. No one has any space to talk about supernatural things and then doctors and psychologists, those science people, they just sneer at you or people. Notice what Ross Douthat actually says. He says that people are afraid that doctors and psychologists will sneer at them. Why are people afraid of that? Let's look at this rationally, which means let's look at the facts of what's going on. Is official knowledge actually shoving supernatural beliefs out? Is it so that there's no space within institutions of higher learning, for example, for ideas that are religious or in other ways supernatural and magic No. That's simply not the case. There are 482 accredited colleges and universities in the USA that have a religious studies department. If you know anything about departments of religious studies, you know that they are overwhelmingly staffed by professors who themselves believe in religion. It’s not absolutely all of them, but most of them. Most of them come out of religious backgrounds. That's why they got a degree in religious studies, because the professional pathway is to get a degree in religious studies and then go become a religious preacher. So, there are 482 accredited colleges and universities that are training people to go out and become religious, and certainly encouraging students to go encounter religious ideas and to take them seriously. There are 850 accredited American colleges and universities that are religiously affiliated, many of them controlled by religious organizations. There are many more unaccredited Bible colleges devoted to teaching Christianity. So actually, Official Knowledge is thoroughly infused with religion. Official Knowledge provides dedicated special places, protected spaces, where religion is given a voice, where the supernatural can come in as a topic so that people can talk about it and take it seriously. Let's also look out on Main Street Official Knowledge. Where are the institutions in our communities? There are over 350,000 Christian churches in the United States of America. They are staffed by people who are preachers and priests and bishops and things like that. These are people who claim to have Official Knowledge. Are those churches being shut down? No, not by outsiders. Sometimes the churches are shutting themselves down because they just can't bring in enough people anymore, but that's a separate issue. There is no one from the outside shutting those churches down. We can take a look in the government. That's another source of Official Knowledge. You know what happens around the country now? Government meetings are led by Christian prayers. That's how they're opened up. They get a local preacher in there and they give a Christian prayer as a ritual opening to government meetings. What about in government schools? K through 12, high schools, elementary schools, middle schools, in an increasing number of states, are actually teaching Christian religion. It is legally required for a public school, a government-run, institution, to have the Christian-defined Ten Commandments. (Actually, in the Pentateuch, there are lots of commandments, but there are not 10 that are designated in particular. Christians have decided that there are 10 and decided what they look like.) Government schools are required legally to post that on the wall. So, public schools are being used to spread religious knowledge. What's the equivalent for skepticism and for atheism? Let's not look at science and say that, “Well, there are also departments of biology and chemistry and physics in universities.” It's true that those science departments exist, but science is not anti-religion. Science is neutral in terms of what's real and what's not real. Science is neutral, because it has a process of separating sense from nonsense, reality from non-reality. Science uses really rigorous techniques to do that. Science is not just sneering at people and intimidating them and making them feel like they're outsiders. Of course, there are scientists who are jerks, because there are people who are not nice in every group of humanity, but the scientific process itself is not at all anti-religion actually. I think you'll find that most scientists are perfectly decent, nice people. They don't engage in a programmatic suppression of religion. Science is not anti-religion. It's neutral toward religion. It critically examines everything. Science does critically examine claims that are made by religious believers. Yes, it happens that if some faith healer comes along, and claims to have certain abilities to heal people, through touch or through magic elixirs, or holy water, or stuff like that, scientists can come along and critically examine those claims. Critical examination means to take rational processes and look at the facts related to what religious people are saying. Do you know what happens much more often than that, so much more often? Most of the time, scientists are critically examining what other scientists say. Should Ross Douthat say, “Oh, people are afraid to go into science because they're afraid that scientists are going to sneer at them, and they're going to ask difficult questions about their work. Oh, that's so terrible. That's a pressure for people not to be scientists.” Would it be reasonable for Ross Douthat to say that? No, it would not be reasonable. Critical examination does not create a pressure for people not to be scientists. Critical examination creates a pressure for people to do good work when they are scientists. It's a pressure, yes. There is a societal pressure to not babble nonsense when you're working at a university or college. Yet there is that safe space of all of those religious studies departments, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all across the country, in colleges and universities that are in their very foundation constitutionally accommodating to religion. In fact, many of them are promoting religion. Official Knowledge is religious all over the place. What about the federal government? We now have, in the White House, an official White House Office for religious affairs, the White House Faith Office. In most branches of the federal government, you have Christian prayer meetings being held by the leadership, pressuring everyone in the government to take part, ostracizing people who do not take part. There is actually pressure and forces of social embarrassment against non-believers in religion from the federal government. The U.S. military has become an organization that practices religious indoctrination. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, as he fancies himself, the civilian leader of the U.S. military has declared that the war against Iran is being done in the name of Jesus, in the name of Christianity. He has established an official Office of Religious Affairs within the Pentagon in order to assess and maintain soldiers’ spiritual readiness, their spiritual aptitude, their spiritual health. The US military is huge, and the U.S. Military is now being used to pressure soldiers to worship, and not just to worship generically, but to follow Christianity specifically, and not even just to follow Christianity in general, but to follow certain kinds of Christianity. The Pentagon has eliminated official recognition for more progressive forms of Christianity, such as Unitarian Universalism. You can't be recognized as a Unitarian Universalist, or a Unitarian or a universalist separately, by the military. The military now requires soldiers to describe themselves as a member of some other Christian denomination if they belong to Unitarian Universalist associations. Under Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon also has no official recognition of atheists or humanists. Soldiers are simply not allowed to describe themselves in those terms. They have to recategorize themselves as agnostic, which means that they're no longer really certain that there is no God, with no gods at all. Now they have to describe themselves as not being sure, like they just haven't made up their minds. All the while, the U.S. military and the U.S. government is infiltrated by huge numbers of, almost always Christian, chaplains. There are Christian chaplains teaching soldiers to be Christian in the US military. Also in the U.S. Congress, every day, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, is opened not by some kind of appointed government official who has experience and expertise in secular affairs. No, both houses of Congress are opened by a Christian chaplain. There has never been a non-Christian chaplain in those positions. The U.S. Congress can't open if there isn't a prayer and a little sermon given by a Christian preacher first. So if we want to talk about Official Knowledge in the United States of America, the facts show that Official Knowledge is thoroughly dominated by a religious perspective, a supernatural perspective in general, and by a Christian perspective specifically. So why is Ross Douthat claiming that the opposite is the case? Ross Douthat is performing a really sad kind of maneuver that is being performed to reposition non-religious people and non-relig

  7. 6d ago

    Repaired Radios That Play Music Are Not Proof Of God, Ross Douthat

    The essence of this chapter of Ross Douthat’s book Believe is the claim that a lot of people think that there's just no evidence for religion, but in fact, there is. Douthat says there’s tons of evidence for a religious perspective. The supposed evidence provided in this chapter is that supernatural experiences, magic, appears in the form of things happen that cannot be explained rationally. That's where we get into the rub of it. “Cannot be explained rationally” means you haven't found the explanation of what happened rationally. It means that you lack information. When you say that something has not been explained rationally, that doesn't mean that it lacks a rational basis, a factual basis. It doesn't mean that it's supernatural. It just means that you haven't found an explanation yet. It's like, going back to an idea from a couple of episodes ago, kind of like thinking about a murder mystery. If someone is killed, and it's certainly a murder, and you find a murder weapon, like a knife in the chest of a person, and they're dead on the floor, but they're in a room that was locked from the inside, that’s a classic thing in murder mysteries, right? The reader is meant to ask: How could it possibly have been done? Who can explain what was going on? You can say there is no logical explanation. There is no rational explanation. That doesn't mean that ghosts did it. That doesn't mean that magic was involved. It means that you haven't found an explanation yet. Ross Douthat is falling for the mistake of failing to understand that distinction in this chapter 3. In a story that he uses to frame this chapter, I said in the last episode that I would get to this and now I am, the story has to do with an experience that was had by Michael Shermer, who has been the editor of Skeptical Enquirer and a very public prominent skeptical writer for a long time. In 2014, Shermer wrote a short article about something that happened when he got married. Earlier that year, in June, he met a woman. He fell in love with her and she agreed to marry him. Her name was Jennifer. She was from Germany, and she grew up being raised partially by her grandfather because her father was not in the picture. I don't know the details of that, but that's not really the important part. The important thing is that her grandfather was very important to her, but he died when she was sixteen yers old, and this story that Shermer relates took place many, many years after that. So, Jennifer is preparing to move in with Michael Shermer. They're going to get married, and a lot of her stuff is shipped over to his house and is damaged in the process. Let me begin to read this to you, word for word from the article Shermer wrote: “She had been raised by her mom, her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged, and several precious heirlooms lost. Including her grandfather's binoculars.” I want you to remember that part about the binoculars, and that a lot of stuff was damaged in the shipping process. Now we're going to go to the radio part. The radio part of this story is where Shermer wants to put the emphasis, and that's pretty important, that he makes that emphasis, instead of, you know, he could have emphasized something else. Anyway, Shermer continues: “His 1978 Phillips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried percussive maintenance, said to work on such devices, smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom. Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home. And in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings.” Now, I’m skipping forward a couple of lines. His new wife says, can we go talk in the back of the house, because I have something I want to say to you? “She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering absurdly if this combined printer scanner fax machine had also include a radio. Nope. At that moment, Jennifer shot me a look. I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller, the exorcist startled audiences. ‘That can't be what I think it is, can it?’ she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes.” Then Shermer’s article quotes Jennifer as saying, “My grandfather is here with us. I'm not alone,” as she cries. Here's something that I really think is pretty important in what's going on in this story: Michael Shermer made a series of efforts to repair this radio. He got new power source and he worked with the electrical connections. He also did the thing of whapping a radio, hitting it against something to try to get it to work. That detail is really important in what we're considering here because that's a common practice with electronic communication devices at this time, things like hitting a TV on the side, slapping it to get it to work again. That would often work. That tells you something about the very fragile nature of electronic communication equipment at that time. It was very arbitrary, that sometimes a radio or a television set would work. and then mysteriously, which just means you don't understand what's going on, it would stop working. That doesn't mean that there are demons or ghosts or supernatural elements causing the radio to work or not to work. It simply means that mysteriously, these things stopped working, but then, somehow, you would do something like hit them, and then, sometimes that would work, and sometimes that wouldn't work. It would get the device to work again, which certainly is pretty bizarre. It means you don't know what you're doing, but kind of you jiggle things around and stuff happens and sometimes that would actually work. A lot of the times it would work. And then a lot of times the radio or TV would just stop working again. What that should tell you, as you're reading this story, is that it's actually very common for these electronic communications devices like radios and TVs to go through periods of working and not working that you don't quite understand. It happens in odd ways. So that's the story that Michael Shermer is talking about: There was a radio, and Shermer did at least a partial, maybe a complete repair of that radio. Then, later on, the radio worked. So he fixed a radio and then it worked. The mysterious part is that the radio didn't seem to work for a long time in between, three months in between. However, Shermer had shoved the radio in the back of a desk drawer. He shoved the radio so far back that when the music was heard, Shermer and his new wife actually went to their next door neighbors to ask them, “Are you guys playing music? What's going on?” The radio was playing so softly, they had trouble hearing it. So, it's actually quite plausible that during the three months in question, that radio was playing at different times when they couldn't hear it. It’s also possible that the radio was playing, but Shermer and Jennifer would just presume that somebody else was playing something somewhere else, like the at the nextdoor neighbors’ house or in another part of their own house. It just so happens that they looked for the source of the music this time. That's actually a really rational explanation for the experience Shermer described, in which they had just been through a wedding, and Michael Shermer's new wife felt as if the radio was her grandfather talking to her from the dead. So we have, on the one hand, a pretty plausible explanation for the experience, which is that a piece of 1970s communication electronic equipment was highly unpredictable and would start working and stop working at odd times. On the other side, we have something else. Ross Douthat is willing to accept a weird idea: That the radio playing a love song, after Michael Shermer's wedding ceremony is proof that his wife's grandfather was using the radio, coming back from the dead, to try to communicate with his granddaughter. Here’s what Ross Douthat is overlooking: The weird supernatural explanation actually requires evidence. It requires evidence apart from merely not understanding how the radio could have turned on. Radios, after all, when you put batteries in them and you repair them, often work. It’s quite normal for old radios will work unpredictably. So, we have a very clear, plausible scenario, with clear lines of evidence. We know that radios work. We know that radios work better when you put batteries in them. We know that radios work better when you try to fix them, which Michael Shermer did. We also know that radios from the 1970s were unpredictable. Thus slapping it up the side of the radio to try to make it to work could be effective So we have a very clear set of evidence there for a rational materialist explanation. What do we have on the other side, for the argument that Michael Shermer's wife's grandfather, who had been dead for many years, somehow was able to come back to life, and was able to use a radio to communicate with his granddaughter? Well, first of all, we have to ask this question: Why would we think that the grandfather was using the radio to communicate with his granddaughter from beyond the dead, the grave, from the dead? Are we supposed to pres

  8. Oct 16

    The Foreskin of Jesus Is Not Magic, Ross Douthat

    Lies do not become more truthful simply because they are repeated. They typically become less credible. That is the case with the lies that form the basis of Roman Catholic claims of miracles, such as the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, as well of the miracles performed by the head of St. John the Baptist, and the foreskin of Jesus, which is miraculously supposed to be held as a holy relic by 31 different Christian churches. These miracles aren’t hard to explain. They’re blatant lies told for the sake of crass economic benefit. Welcome to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that is devoted to an examination of a single book. That book is Believe: why everyone should be religious. The author of that book is Ross Douthat, a right wing Christian pundit. We are now on page 71. We have entered into chapter 3 and chapter 3 begins with a pretty wild story, and it ends with that story. So we'll get back to that because it's kind of a frame for this entire chapter here. I want to remind you that Ross Douthat is claiming that, um, he is going to establish a reasonable grounds for belief in religion that doesn't require faith. He says that you just should be able to think with your logical mind and be rational about it, and it'll be obvious to everybody that religion is true. And so, this this chapter is about miracles. Now, miracles are by definition exceptions to the rule. They are moments when the ordinary rules are the standard ways of reality working are broken and anything can happen at all. So this is a really odd kind of thing because Ross Douthat has claimed that the existence of laws in the universe proves that there's a divine Lawgiver, but now he's arguing that the universe is actually lawless that, you know, anything can happen at any time. You can have miracles occur. Ross Douthat refers to one miracle in particular on page 71: The Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal in 1918. The official Catholic Church storyline of this is that there were these three children who started telling the adults around them that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary. The adults were like, “Really? You've been talking to the Virgin Mary, prove it.”The children said, “Well, the Virgin Mary told us that there's going to be something really funky happening up in the sky.” Okay, they didn't use a word “funky.” They used a Portuguese word which means, you know, something really fancy. It's going to happen up in the sky, and so thousands and thousands of Catholic believers, actually tens of thousands came to see if that would be true. Then, according to Ross Douthat, “The sun appeared to dance before tens of thousands of witnesses.” All of those witnesses were Catholic believers. You gotta wonder, why did tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up at a single location, simply because three kids said that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary. I mean, kids say a lot of things. Kids say, “I’m a superhero.” Kids say, “I’ve got an imaginary friend.” Kids say stuff like that. This is where the miracle begins to be suspicious. It begins to look like something of a setup, because, you know, I think most adults understand very well that when children say outlandish things, you need to take it with more than a grain of salt. So why did those tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up? Well, we'll get to that. The way that Ross Douthat describes this supposed miracle is kind of suspect on its own. He describes them merely as witnesses, but these were not disinterested witnesses, these were people who already were true believers in Roman Catholicism, members of the church, devout people who had been organized. To show up in this place. Let's get to the miracle part. The sun appeared to dance in the sky. According to Ross Douthat, that's really what happened. Actually, if you look at descriptions of the event that were gathered, That's not really what happened? Now, some of them may have used the word dance, but others got more specific. They said that the sun was going in great big circles and spirals in the sky. Yet other observers said that they saw the sun go in great big zigzags back and forth in the sky, and yet more, thousands of people who had gone there, as Roman Catholic, loyal witnesses to a predicted event that everyone was expecting to happen, said that nothing happened at all. The sun didn't move in the sky. So what was really going on? Ross Douthat says, well, this is clear evidence that God is is truly real, and that the Roman Catholic church is real, and that the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus who was an incarnation of God, actually, is around all the time and talking to people, and it's a miracle. Yay, it's magic! It's Christian magic! Therefore, you should be a Christian. Case closed, right? Yeah, not really case closed, actually. You see, the thing is, Ross Douthat seems to discount quite a bit of things. For example, people are really fond of telling lies, and when other people are telling a lie, they are awfully fond of joining in. We have a well-known story that describes this principle of human behavior. It's called the Emperor's New Clothes. When everyone in town, you know how it goes, everyone in town says to the emperor, he's got great new clothes. In fact, he's naked, but no one wants to say, hey, the emperor's not wearing clothes. I think that's what we've got going on here. Let me tell you why I believe that. When it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, Well, there's no nice way to put this. Roman Catholic Church has a long, long history of lying about miracles, absolutely lying about miracles. I will give you a very specific example. It has to do with holy relics that are supposed to have uh, magical powers, okay? The head of St. John the Baptist, for example. The head of St. John the Baptist has been claimed as a relic by multiple Roman Catholic churches. I mean, not just the church, but we're talking about specific cathedrals, specific churches. For example, uh, the head of St. John the Baptist is said by the Church of San Silvestro, in Rome, to be there, and they've got it right there in the church, and pilgrims come, and they pay homage to it, and they, um, expect that the, The head of St. John the Baptist is going to perform miracles for them. The problem is that the cathedral in Amiens, this is in France, also claims to have the head of St. John the Baptist, as does the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. All of these places are saying, “Hey, we've all got the head of St. John the Baptist.” Now, I don't think that even Roman Catholics believe that there has been a miracle where this head of St. John the Baptist has split into three copies of itself so that there can be three magical objects so that pilgrims. Will come to a church and pray at that church and leave financial donations at that church. You see, these holy relics are at shrines, and one of the things that happens at a Roman Catholic shrine is that people leave financial donations in exchange for the miracles that they believe they are going to benefit from the magic Roman Catholic spells that they are going to be the beneficiaries of while at these shrines. Do you know what those three little kids said that the Virgin Mary said to them, when she appeared to them, but nobody else could see her, they said that the Virgin Mary said that everybody had to build a shrine there to the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal. Guess what? That shrine is still active today. And there are hordes of people who go to that shrine every year. It's a major destination, and the town surrounding the shrine has all of these shops that sell religious relics, and people give money to the church, at the shrine, and people are making a killing, a killing for these relics. Let me give you another example of the kind of relics that are out there in the world. There is, um, the foreskin of Jesus. The foreskin of Jesus. You know where the foreskin is, right? It's the little bit of the penis that is cut off from the body of a little boy when he's just a baby in Judaism, but also in most parts of Christianity. This is ritualized genital mutilation. The Roman Catholic church has claimed that the foreskin of Jesus is a magical object that can perform miracles. Specifically, it can help women to give birth to babies, to get pregnant. It can help men to become fertile when they have been infertile. It has magical powers, the foreskin of Jesus. There's just a little bit of a problem here. The foreskin of Jesus has been claimed to be kept as an object by 31 different churches. 31 different churches in Europe have claimed that they have the holy foreskin of Jesus in France alone. We have a church in Paris, one in Toulouse, one in shark, one in Metz, one in Conch, one in Lang, one in Besancon. You get the idea. There's one in Le Puy en Velet. I'm not pronouncing that exactly right. There's one in the abbey of Sharu, and we go up to Belgium and the Notre Dame Cathedral, not the famous one in France, but this one's in Belgium, just across the border. Oh, but back down in France. The church of Cologne, also has that foreskin of Jesus. The foreskin of Jesus. There was this problem in the Roman Catholic Church that so many churches said, we have it. We have it. We have it. We got it while we were on a Crusade, and we brought it back, and now we've got the foreskin of Jesus. It began to look pretty ridiculous, and then, you know, people started telling jokes about it. It got really out of control. So back in the 1600s, there was a Roman Catholic scholar and Vatican librarian named Leo Alatius. He said that what actually happened to the foreskin of Jesus was that when Jesus ascended to heaven, his foreskin ascended separately. It rose through the sky into the heavens into outer space, and the foreskin of Jesus is what became the rings of the planet Saturn. I'm not making this up. This is from a Catholic schola

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Ross Douthat wrote a book called Believe - Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This podcast reviews that book, page by page, to seek whether the arguments Ross Douthat makes for Christianity hold up to skeptical scrutiny. Can a Christian apologist withstand the critical review of a reader who doesn’t begin with the author’s Christian bias?

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