Category: Christianity

Book take: “Heretic” by Catherine Nixey: a heterodox view of Christianity

May 12, 2026 • 9:30 am

Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus.  “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).

This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages.  Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:

In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge

Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis.  That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty.  I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):

In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.

The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.

What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.

Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.

Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.

One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):

. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.

And from the Epilogue (p. 279):

This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).

The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.

I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)


Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun:

Easter homily: Baron David Frost touts God in the Telegraph

April 5, 2026 • 10:15 am

I guess the Torygraph is considered “mainstream media” in the UK, and, like American MSM, seems to be touting religion in a way we didn’t see a few years ago. In this short article, which I found through the disparaging tweet below (an accurate, tweet, it seems), Baron David Frost, a conservative political bigwig in the UK, tells us why we should be going to church this Easter.  He seems to love “full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which apparently means the whole Catholic hog, from snout to tail. No “skim Christianity” for him!

Go below to read the article.

Hello, I am mental.

— Richard Smyth (@rsmythfreelance.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T07:46:00.501Z

Click the screenshot below to go to an archived version of the Torygraph piece, which describes Lord Frost (is that the same thing as a Baron?) this way:

Lord Frost led the negotiations that finally took Britain out of the EU in 2020.  A Cabinet minister in the Boris Johnson government, he resigned in protest at the handling of Covid lockdowns, and has since been a persistent advocate of a more fully conservative approach to policy on the Right. He is a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.

Wikipedia adds this:

David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost (born 21 February 1965) is a British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.

Frost spent his early professional career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming Ambassador to Denmark, EU Director at the FCO, and Director for Europe and International Trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was a special adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government.

And yes, I have to say, although it’s Easter, the guy is mental, for he thinks that anybody who has had an elevating aesthetic or emotional experience is providing evidence not just for God, but for the God of Rome.

I’ll put a few topics under bold headings (mine). The indented parts are from the article by Baron Frost.

The evidence for a revival of Christianity is weak. First, Frost makes this admission:

The Quiet Revival – the view that people are coming back to church and the long years of decline might be over – has been much discussed in ecclesiastical circles this last year. A YouGov poll in a Bible Society report seemed to vindicate it by asserting the number of 18 to 24-year-olds attending church monthly had jumped from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024.

It’s fair to say that these figures were a bit controversial right from the start. And the doubts were justified last week, when YouGov, in its latest polling flop, had to admit it had made an error and had not applied proper quality control to its sample.

So are we back to square one? Is the whole thing just confirmation bias and wishful thinking?

So he gives the “evidence” for the revival, which he has to find in places other than the polls. One is in hearsay, another his own behavior:

I don’t think so. Something is definitely happening, if not exactly what the Bible Society described. There is too much other evidence. Numbers coming into the Catholic Church each Easter, here and across the West, are increasing (I was one in 2025). Footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back. Sales of printed Bibles have doubled. There is even a mini boom in the Greek Orthodox Church going on.

Summing it up, the Rev Daniel French, chaplain at Greenwich University and Irreverend podcaster, said: “I see considerable curiosity about faith, particularly from young adults, often men. The old assumptions that religious conversations are taboo have evaporated. My week is filled with impromptu chats about God in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.”

Why is the West becoming more Christian? It isn’t, but this is what the sweating Baron says: it’s the Internet and the stagnation of society, Jake!

Why might this be? It’s speculative, but my experience suggests several different reasons. One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”

There is also the collapse of the narrative of inevitable progress, the belief that young people will always be economically better off than their parents, the growing dysfunction in society starting with the pandemic, all may be generating a tendency to look beyond economics for life satisfaction.

Of course we know that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and well-being, a correlation that holds across both nations and U.S. states. The worse off you are, the more religious you are. Further, there’s a positive correlation between income inequality (measured by the “Gini index”) and religiosity: the higher the inequality, the more religious people are. That the former produces the latter, so it’s not a spurious correlation, is supported by the fact that religiosity rises a year after inequality rises.  Likewise with falls of inequality and falls of religiosity. That’s not proof, but is support for the connection made famous by Karl Marx, a quotation that is often truncated to distort its meaning:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

What Marx was saying was not that religion was good for people because it soothed them, but that it was bad for people because it was what people did when they could not find relief from their suffering and oppression through means that could actually improve their situation. They thus have to turn to the opium of belief.

The Baron sees evidence for God every time people have an aesthetic or spiritual experience.  Not just evidence for God, apparently, but evidence for Catholicism!:

Reflect on the experiences in your life where you feel, for a moment, you might have had an experience of something beyond this world, a moment in the English countryside, a phrase of music that tugs at the heartstrings, and ask yourself why you feel that, if material reality is really all there is. Consider too that most people in history, and indeed most people in the world today, have not had that belief, and maybe aren’t all wrong. Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.

But of course people throughout the world have this kind of experience, people including atheists like Richard Dawkins and me. And not for a minute do we think that emotionality is evidence for gods. Is it evidence for Allah, and also for Xenu and Vishnu?

The evidence that these emotions and epiphanies are the product of material reality can be seen, for one thing, because you can have them simply by taking drugs. I remember once when I was in college, doing a science fellowship during the summer, I took LSD and walked through the quad (the “Sunken Garden”) at William and Mary.  There were high-school brass bands having some kind of competition, and, in my psychedelic daze, their ragged, dissonant music seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Was that evidence for God? Had I not been tripping, I would have run away in horror.

The Baron admits that Christianity is meaningless unles you believe its foundational truths. You don’t often see this kind of admission since “sophisticated” believers don’t like to admit it, nor will they say explicitly what they believe:

After all, the important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is not properly consider it. And in Western society that is all too easy.

I’ve considered the “evidence”, which of course is almost entirely what’s in the Bible.  And I don’t buy it, as I suspect most of the readers here don’t.  And what about the gazillion other faiths of the world. Why does Frost reject Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults but accept the “truth” of Christianity? (Like Christians, adherents to cargo cults keep waiting for a savior who never comes.) I’d like the Baron to tell me how he knows not just the Resurrection and Jesus’s “miracles” were true, but why the writing of the Quran is a bogus story. And why, among Christian religions, are the dictates of Catholicm true? (The Baron touts the revival of religion as involving mainly Catholicism and “Protestant evangelicals.)  Gimme that full-fat religion!

The Baron tells us why we should go to Church.

In an essay entitled Man or Rabbit?, CS Lewis gently mocked those who didn’t reject Christianity but tried to ignore it, not from disbelief, but from a suspicion that it might be true after all and that acknowledging it would be inconvenient – rather like someone who doesn’t open their bank statements for fear of what might be in them. Don’t be like that person. Face the issue head on. At least give Christianity a fair hearing. Show up to church this Easter. You never know what might happen.

I ignore Christianity because it’s a full-fat superstition supported by no evidence. I’m amused that he quotes C. S. Lewis, who I admit I find hilariously stupid about religion even though his Mere Christianity is probably the most influential work of popular theology ever. I’ve read it, of course, and I always have to laugh when I read “Lewis’s trilemma“—an argument for the divinity of Jesus and truth of his message. Lewis actually stole this argument from others, as several people had made it before him. Here’s Lewis’s version:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Of course there are alternatives to “liar, lunatic, or Lord”; I’m sure you can think of at least one: people made up what Jesus said in the Bible. You can read alternative criticisms here.

But the real question is whether Frost himself is a liar, lunatic, or Lord. And we already know the answer: he’s a Lord.

I guess I’m just splenetic on this day when people go to Church to worship something for which there’s no evidence. And, contra Frost, I won’t be showing up to church this Easter. Instead, I’m writing this post.

Bart Ehrman schools Ross Douthat on Christianity and how to find Biblical “truth”

April 3, 2026 • 9:40 am

The NYT “opinion” piece below is very long, and is in fact a transcript of a discussion of Christianity pitting Biblical scholar and atheist Bart Ehrman against dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Ross Douthat.  If you’ve read this website lately, you’ll know that Douthat is all over the place touting Jesus: he’s published a new book, he’s debated Steve Pinker on God, he’s written a gazillion columns highlighting his book and its reasons why we should be Christians, and in today’s piece he and Ehrman discusses the “truth” of the New Testament.

I have little respect for Douthat because his case for a divine being in general, and for Christianity in particular, simply involves the same tired old (and not dispositive) assertions, many of them based on science (e.g. the “fine-tuned” universe, the mystery of consciousness, etc.).  Douthat’s drunk the whole chalice of Kool-Aid, and is not self-critical.

Ehrman, on the other hand, is an impressive guy. He started out as a Biblical literalist and practicing fundamentalist Christian, eventually becoming a Baptist preacher. Then he realized, based on the existence of inexplicable evil in the world, that the whole Jesus-and-God story was largely bushwa, and he wrote a bunch of books showing why. He knows his Bible better than does Douthat, and can quote chapter and verse without even looking at the book.

Now Ehrman does think that there’s a factual core of the New Testament, in that he thinks the evidence for the existence of a Jesus person who taught disciples is an absolutely secure historical fact. So, he thinks, is the Crucifixion, though not the Resurrection: Ehrman has no truck with miracles, adhering to Hume’s argument that unless they are more probable than the reliability of their witnesses, they shouldn’t be accepted.  Ehrman also has no truck with mythicists (I flirt with such a position) who aren’t convinced that there was a real Jesus person. Ehrman thinks that historical-Jesus believers, who are indeed in the majority among Biblical scholars, have a solid case. (The evidence for that, though, is based largely on what’s written in the Bible.)

[UPDATE:  See comment 3 below by Roger Lambert, citing Richard Carrier’s critique of Ehrman’s view that a Jesus person absolutely existed. Carrier is a “mythicist” who doubts the existence of a Jesus person. You can see more of Carrier’s arguments here.]

At any rate, you can either hear the discussion (82 minutes) or read it (the latter is a lot faster for me) at the NYT link below. It is an object lesson (from Ehrman) on how to assess the Bible as “truth”, and also how a historian uses evidence when confronting Scripture. Ehrman spends a lot of time schooling Douthat on these issues, and Douthat comes off as a credulous schoolboy.

The main point that Ehrman wants to make in this discussion is that Jesus and then Christianity introduced to the world the idea that we should love people whom we don’t know, a view that has led to good things like hospitals and orphanages. Ehrman has just published a new book on this thesis: Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. 

I have a few doubts about that, including the fact that Ehrman takes it for granted that this was one of Jesus’s teachings without good evidence for that claim, and that the idea of loving others whom you don’t know was not invented by Christians. Ehrman may be right with respect to the West, so his book (which I haven’t read) at least has the geography of love correct, but he’s on shakier ground saying that loving strangers was indeed a teaching of Jesus. Ehrman even notes that Jesus didn’t say to love everyone, only the members of one’s tribe—Israelites. And of course some of Jesus’s teachings, like “take no thought for the morrow” or “abandoning your family and loved ones to follow me”, aren’t ones we should follow. After all, Jesus did also say that the end of the Earth and his return was nigh:

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28).

Ehrman would surely argue that the last verse, while Jesus may have said it, was simply untrue. But if Jesus did say it, Christians have to explain it.  The fact is that, as even Ehrman admits, we have no idea what Jesus said. Ehrman sort of admits that, but then apparently has some secret way to separate what Jesus really said versus what people made up about him later.

Click the screenshot below to read, or see the article archived here. If you have some time, I think it’s worth hearing or reading.

I’ll give a few quotes from the discussion, most of them from Ehrman (indicated with an “E”; Douthat’s quotes are prefaced with a “D”). These quotes are indented, while my comments are flush left.

Ehrman’s argument:

I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.

So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.

. . .The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.

Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.

. . . What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you — the other. You’re not supposed to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them.

(Ehrman is referring at least in part to recent wars, and he admits that he’s a political liberal, but denies that his argument is in any way political. I believe him.) But yes, if you claim to follow Jesus’s teachings, you should follow Jesus’s teachings. And then you should leave your family and give away everything you have.

But of course the argument that The Love Everyone Idea came from Jesus is an untestable assertion, since we can’t repeat history without a Jesus person.  But if Jesus didn’t teach that, then it came from somewhere else and can be attributed simply to humanism and not credited to Christianity. It could have simply been one of the many things made up by people who wrote the Bible. After all, Ehrman claims that much of the Bible is false.

How about these teachings of Jesus?

From Matthew 6 (King James version, which is the version I’ll use): take no thought for the morrow:

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? 26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? 27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?  28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Follow me, not your family or loved ones (Luke 14:25-27):

25 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, 26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. 27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Why are Christians supposed to follow the love commandment but not the others? I don’t know, nor does Ehrman tell us.

A further problem with Ehrman’s claim is, as he says below, to Jesus “your neighbor” doesn’t just mean anybody, but apparently only fellow Israelites— members of your tribe.  But that’s not what Ehrman thinks we should do today; he think we need a new interpretation of Jesus’s words to fit the 21st century. And that means loving everyone:

E:  You can’t simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. If any government tried to institute, as their governmental policy, the Sermon on the Mount, they’d last about two days, period.

I’m not saying that it’s this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example. But the Bible is quite clear, even in the New Testament, that “Love your neighbor as yourself” meant your fellow Israelite, or it explicitly states that anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite.

This baffles me.  He is updating Jesus’s words here, and so we should follow Ehrman’s interpretation, not Jesus’s supposed teachings themselves. How do we know what, according to Ehrman, Jesus really said or taught, and what words were put into his mouth later? We don’t know from this interview, though perhaps it’s in Ehrman’s new book.

Ehrman: Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.

There are a lot of reasons for that.

Douthat: Give me three reasons.

Ehrman: They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event, where they both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things: The authors living much later, and the contradiction.

The third thing is: These authors got their stories from somewhere. We don’t know where the authors lived and we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But we don’t ——

All true. But note Ehrman’s statement, “I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.” He may think that the consistency of Jesus’s “love” message indicates that a Jesus person really taught that, but there’s also a consistency in Jesus saying that he was the son of God. Yet Ehrman believes the former but not the latter.

Here’s Ehrman explaining why he became an atheist: he couldn’t accept theodicy:

E:  I taught at Rutgers for a few years, and when I was there, I was asked to teach a class called The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Tradition. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible in one way or another is trying to wrestle with the problem of, especially, why the people of God suffer.

And I had realized by this time that there’s not an answer in the Bible — there are lots of different answers. And some of these answers are in conflict with each other.

. . .I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world.

And I’m not a radical atheist who insists there is no God, but I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s any kind of supernatural power that’s overseeing the world, that is active in people’s lives, that actually answers prayer. I don’t believe a God like that exists.

Douthat doesn’t have an answer for that.

Finally, is it true that Jesus did introduce the idea of loving your neighbor to the West? Well, my friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry, discussing this with me via email, decided to ask the bot Claude. Here’s the question (in bold) and Claude’s answer:

Is it true that there were a lot of Axial Age religions that promoted counterintuitive and challenging moral codes, like loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, apart from Christianity?

Yes, this is a well-documented observation among historians of religion and philosophy. The Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE, a term coined by Karl Jaspers) saw a remarkable convergence across several civilizations, where thinkers independently developed moral and ethical frameworks that challenged conventional human instincts like tribalism, revenge, and self-interest.

Here are some notable parallels:

Buddhism (5th century BCE) is perhaps the most striking example. The Buddha taught mettā (loving-kindness) toward all beings, including those who harm you. The Dhammapada contains passages urging practitioners to overcome hatred with love and to respond to anger with calm — very close in spirit to “love your enemy.”

Confucianism and Mohism in China offered related ideas. While Confucius was more measured (when asked about repaying injury with kindness, he replied “repay injury with justice”), Mozi (5th century BCE) went further with his doctrine of jiān ài (universal or impartial love), arguing that people should care for strangers and even rival states as much as their own — a radically counterintuitive position that was widely debated precisely because it cut against natural partiality.

Jainism developed ahimsa (non-violence) to an extreme degree, extending compassion and non-harm to all living creatures, including insects. This demanded extraordinary self-discipline and restraint even toward those who might threaten you.

Stoicism in Greece taught that all human beings share in a universal rational nature, and that anger and vengeance are failures of reason. Marcus Aurelius (though later than the Axial Age proper) wrote extensively about responding to hostility with understanding rather than retaliation, building on earlier Stoic foundations.

Zoroastrianism emphasized the moral duty to actively choose good over evil, framing ethics as a cosmic struggle that required personal sacrifice and integrity beyond mere self-interest.

The Hebrew prophetic tradition — figures like Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah — challenged their own society with demands for justice toward the poor, the stranger, and the marginalized, often at great personal cost.

What makes the Axial Age so fascinating to scholars is that these developments happened largely independently across cultures that had little or no contact with each other. The common thread seems to be that as societies grew more complex and urbanized, thinkers began reflecting more deeply on the gap between how people naturally behave and how they ought to behave — and many of them arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about the need to extend moral concern beyond one’s in-group.

So Christianity’s ethic of enemy-love, while distinctive in its specific theological framing, was part of a broader human pattern of moral discovery during this period. That doesn’t diminish its significance, but it does place it in a richer historical context.

Even in the West, then, there were antecedents to Jesus’s message of love.

While I have a lot of respect for Ehrman, I don’t understand how he managed to separate the wheat of “love they neighbor” from the chaff of “follow me and neglect your family and friends”.  I do think, though, that the message of treating everyone with respect (I can’t bring myself to love everyone!) would have come from humanism as a guideline equal in force to that of “love thy neighbor.” Would we lack hospitals and orphanages if Christianity didn’t exist? (Go read about what Catholic Ireland did to orphanages!)  Steve Pinker has pointed out the reason for this in recent years: we have no special privilege simply by being us. And remember that although love may have been the Christian message, for two millennia avowed Christians have flouted that dictum. It doesn’t, then have any pride of place over the similar dictum of humanism.

Atlantic: What atheism (supposedly) can’t explain

March 15, 2026 • 11:30 am

Christopher Beha‘s new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, appears to have gotten a lot of attention (including a guest essay in the NYT and a long essay in the New Yorker)—more attention than it deserves, I think—for several reasons. First, there’s a resurgence of books dissing “new atheism”, mainly because it doesn’t give us meaning, doesn’t fill the “God-shaped” hole that supposedly afflicts all of us. Second, the book makes the familiar argument that science itself (connected with atheism, it’s argued) is impotent at explaining consciousness, and the religious public loves to hear that science is stymied by such a problem (in the case of consciousness, it isn’t; the problem is just hard).  Finally, Beha has name recognition because he was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine for four years.

I haven’t read the whole book, but I’ve read both of his articles above as well as other reviews, and I’m not impressed, as there’s really nothing new here. Still, I suppose that just as the arguments of atheism must be made repeatedly to enlighten each new generation, so the arguments against atheism must also be made again and again by believers. (I wonder, though, why, if New Atheism was such a dud, as many say, there are so many books going after it.)

Click below to read an archived version.

I’ve written on this website two critiques of excerpts and arguments from Beha’s book  (here and here), and I just saw another negative review by Ronald Lindsay in Free Inquiry. Lindsay pretty much sums up the problems with the book in these paragraphs:

Building on his skepticism about science, Beha further argues that science cannot explain consciousness, which, for him, is a limitation that “proved fatal.” He states that science deals with material things, and because consciousness “is not material … not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge,” then “[b]y the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist.”

Wow, that’s several misstatements in the space of a few sentences. To begin, consciousness is not a “thing.” It’s a processing of information based on inputs from indisputably material things. And there are few, if any, scientists who claim consciousness is not real. Finally, there is overwhelming evidence that the processing of information that is consciousness is dependent on the existence of and proper functioning of our material brains, which science does study with increasing understanding. No, we do not yet have a complete explanation of how consciousness arises, but that is no justification for inferring there is some immaterial, spiritual reality beyond the reach of science.

Frankly, these arguments are so poor they seem like makeweights for Beha’s real beef with atheism: it doesn’t direct him how to live. Beha’s disenchantment with atheism began when he realized atheism didn’t answer the question “How should I be?” Atheism did not tell him “what is good.” As Beha states, most atheists hold that people decide for themselves how to live.

Here is the crux of the quarrel that many theists have with atheism. They believe atheism leaves them rudderless, thrown back on their own resources in forging a life with meaning and value. By contrast, they believe that God provides them with an objective grounding, with clear direction. They no longer have to decide for themselves.

No, atheism doesn’t tell us how to live. It’s simply a claim that there is no convincing evidence for divine beings, ergo we shouldn’t accept them, much less make them the centerpiece of our lives.  If as a you want to find a way to live, you must go beyond that.  Some people like Beha find it easy to slip into an existing religion, which comes ready-made with meaning.  (But how do you know you’ve chosen the right or “true” religion?)  Others do the harder work of thinking for themselves, with many atheists accepting secular humanism as a guideline, but interpeting it in their own way.  Beha is apparently afflicted with doubt (he used to be an atheist), but has settled on Catholicism.

Parrales and the Atlantic are surprisingly appreciative of Beha’s glomming onto his youthful Catholicism. The last paragraph of the review is this:

Is it possible to understand Christianity as a bulwark against social change and still hold on to faith sincerely? I think so—Ali and Vance have elsewhere also reflected more personally on their conversions, for example. But describing one’s religion primarily as a tool to harken back to the past, or as a way to defeat your enemies, risks overlooking the humanizing power of belief. This is what makes Beha’s book so worthwhile, for showing how religion at its best offers more than a theory of cultural renewal. As his there-and-back-again story conveys, faith can foster humility, of the mind and of the heart, and a desire to see others with the love that they believe God sees in people.

Yes, religion gives us ready-made morality, comforting fictions, and, of course, a community of fellow believers. That’s about all the “meaning” it offers. As for its “humanizing” power, how does believing in fiction “humanize” you? Sure, you can cite the Golden Rule, but secularists have made the same argument. And there’s nothing in humanism that promotes misogyny, hatred of non-humanists, or the like—the ubiquitous downsides of religion.  Was Parrales thinking of all religions when he wrote that, including Islam, Hinduism, fundamentalist Christianity, and so on? Are those “humanizing” faiths?

But Parrales emphasizes in his piece that Beha’s falling in love with a woman (curiously, an atheist who remains a nonbeliever!) is what brought him back to Jesus.  We hear the usual arguments that stuff like “love” cannot be explained or understood by scientists, something that’s completely irrelevant to the evidence for gods. Perrales:

For Beha, though, falling in love was more than merely analogous to having faith; it was a catalyst. More than a decade after first reading Russell, he began seeing someone. It went poorly at first—he acted “wooden and self-conscious” and rambled about his literary ambitions while she nodded politely. (“She was not the kind of person who judged other people on what they did for a living,” Beha writes.) But once he changed course and tried to make her laugh instead, she taught him two things: that he could, and that he was “still capable” of both being happy and making another person so. Within a year, they were engaged.

That wasn’t the only change. He quit drinking. His depression receded. The thought of having kids, something he had previously written off as a futile act, now appealed to him. As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.”

The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin. Romantic idealism—Beha’s term for the belief of atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche that each individual must fashion meaning in a meaningless universe—could not contend with the fact that Beha hadn’t brought about his newfound sense of meaning on his own. It was external, at the mercy of someone else.

To Beha’s surprise, the Catholic faith that he thought he had left behind provided the meaning he was seeking. Inspired by medieval-Christian mysticism—a tradition that emphasizes contemplation and a “willingness to live with perplexity”—and the New Testament’s claim that God is not just loving but love itself, he started attending Mass once again.

Surprise! Beha found that Catholicism was a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece left. How convenient!  Contemplation, of course, is not the purview of just Catholicism (many humanists meditate), and of course a scientific frame of mind (or rationality itself) mandates being a diehard skeptic. There are no bigger skeptics and doubters than scientists, for it’s a professional virtue.

There’s more, but I’ll add just one more bit. Perrales describes others, notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali and J. D. Vance, of also finding solace in religion, not because of its truth claims but because it’s a remedy for a “lack of meaning”

Take the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In 2023, after many years as a committed atheist, she described her conversion to Christianity as being motivated by a desire to “fight off” the “formidable forces” of authoritarianism, Islam, and “woke ideology.” She made no mention of Christ, or of love. At a 2021 conference, J. D. Vance described his conversion to Catholicism by saying, “I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old. I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” The British rapper Zuby posted on X a few years ago that “the West is absolutely screwed if it loses Christianity.” (The post received nearly 2 million views and earned a reply from Elon Musk, who said, “I think you’re probably right.”)

Parrales hasn’t done his homework, for, as I recall, Hirsi Ali did admit she accepted the tenets of Christianity. At first I couldn’t find the proof, but Grok gave me the evidence:

In a live debate with Richard Dawkins at the Dissident Dialogues Festival in New York on June 3, 2024 (hosted by UnHerd), Hirsi Ali explicitly addressed her acceptance of key tenets. When Dawkins pressed her on whether she believes in the virgin birth and Resurrection, she responded affirmatively to the latter, stating, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.”

She framed this as a deliberate choice rooted in her personal spiritual experience, including answered prayers during a time of crisis, which led her to embrace the “story of Jesus Christ” as a symbol of redemption and rebirth.

Here’s the video, so check for yourself, (start 7 minutes in). Hirsi Ali is reluctant to admit her specific beliefs, perhaps because it’s embarrassing.  I don’t get the “I choose to believe” claim. Because you “choose” to believe what you find consoling doesn’t make it true!
As I recall, the audience in this debate was firmly on Ayaan’s side, but I haven’t listened to this debate for several years.

At any rate, I was sad to see The Atlantic boosting faith, and boosting it as a medicine that can give meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives.

CBS/Free Press launches a series of debates and town halls. Coming up: Steve Pinker to debate Ross Douthat on God

February 12, 2026 • 9:10 am

In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.

Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?

Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it.  I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.

Click below to access the general announcement.

Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.

This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.

We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.

THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.

Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.

This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.

JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:

The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.

THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:

Town Halls:

  • Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.

  • Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.

  • In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.

Debates:

  • Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?

  • God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?

  • The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?

Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.

An atheist reviews Charles Murray’s new pro-God book

February 2, 2026 • 10:20 am

Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.

Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously.  And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand.  Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:

Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.

But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.

I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.

a.) There is something rather than nothing.

b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation. 

I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)

c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die. 

In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God  Daseler adds further evidence:

Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.

I should add that Murray also accepts “near-death experiences” (“NDE”s) as evidence for God, as do recent books like Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Both of these books have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and some Googling will turn up ample critiques.

d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray

This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer.  But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.

e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.

Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior.  Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt).  Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:

  • There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
  • Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
  • There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
  • When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
  • The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
  • By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
  • There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
  • Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.

And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?

Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.

Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:

Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”

The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”

In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:

I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it?  Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.

If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better.  But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

 “. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.

Bari Weiss makes her CBS debut: a discussion with Erika Kirk

December 15, 2025 • 9:45 am

As I reported before, Bari Weiss, former NYT columnist and then founder of The Free Press, has become Editor-in-Chief of CBS News as the Free Press has joined Paramount, which owns CBS.  I was wary of this for one reason: how this might slant CBS News, though I never watch it anyway. The Free Press is heterodox and, most disturbingly, seems to be soft on religion. Will that infect CBS?

On Saturday night Weiss made her first appearance as a CBS news person, hosting a 45-minute “town hall meeting” with Erika Kirk, the widow of recently assassinated Charlie Kirk, head of  the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA).  I’ve put the video below.

It was not a propitious interview; in fact, it was pretty boring and repetitive. But that might have been because Erika Kirk seems to be a one-note person, devoted not only to dutifully following the principles of her husband, whom she idolized, but especially devoted to proselytizing about Jesus and God. For religion is one of the main pivots of both Kirk and TPUSA. (Kirk recently issued a book urging us all to rest on the Biblical Sabbath, called Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life.)

The format of this town hall will probably be the one Weiss uses in her future town halls, and she promises many of them. She interviews a subject, and then select members of the audience (an audience relevant to the speaker’s beliefs) ask questions. You can see the video below.

First, let me note that Kirk is entitled to her beliefs, though I don’t think Weiss did her any favors by allowing her to proselytize ad infinitum in the interview.  Second, I do have immense sympathy for Ms. Kirk, who is left with two small children after her husband’s brutal assassination.  And the joy and glee that came out when Kirk was killed was unseemly, and surely deeply hurtful to Erika. This is not a critique of Erika Kirk, but of the show itself. And I’ll add that though I think Kirk’s murder was abhorrent and reprehensible, I still disagreed with almost all of his political stands, stands instantiated in TPUSA.

What struck me most were two things: Kirk’s evasion of any questions that were “hard”, like one asking her if she condemned Trump’s violent political rhetoric or whether words could constitute violence. Her response was almost invariably to say that the Lord (aka Jesus) will take care of everything.  For example, when she was asked whether she’d condemn Trump’s political rhetoric that was sometimes violent, she simply said that the problem was “so much deeper than just one person.” When asked to respond to Charlie’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, she simply said that she was in favor of merit. (The Civil Rights Act was not “affirmative action” it was enacted to give blacks their Constitutional rights.)

The other issue was Kirk’s incessant proselytyzing. When asked why, she thought, God/Jesus allowed Kirk to be murdered, she said that it unleashed a big revival (I doubt it), that “the Lord is moving in ways we have no idea, and that God is going to use Charlie’s death to show the world something. Big.  God, she thinks, will use the event to allow her “to bring glory to her and his kingdom.”

The father of a murdered Jewish person asks Erika about growing antisemitism on the Right, and will she condemn individuals spreading that hate? She responds simply that we all need the Lord and Saviour (she’s referring to Jesus, but the guy asking questions was a Jew). She adds, “You cannot separate the Old Testament from the New Testament,” but I doubt she believes that. Kirk himself, though a supporter of Israel, made several remarks that seem overtly antisemitic, and TPUSA is aligned heavily with the Christian right. You do not tout Jesus to Jews.

It is God and Jesus all the way down, and Weiss did not question the foundations of Kirk’s faith, which perhaps would have been an unfair question give Erika’s emotionality.

Kirk reiterates constantly the fact that Charlie only wanted to have conversations, but that’s a bit of dissimulation, for Charlie Kirk was firm in his right-wing ideology and I doubt the conversations would ever have changed his mind. I applaud the desire to have mutual, civil, and nonviolent exchanges of views, but those conversations should be conducted in a way that each person should be able to tell us what evidence would change their minds. Charlie would never change his mind, despite the fact that he sat behind tables with signs making provocative statements and adding . . . “Change my mind.”

To her credit, Weiss and others do try to ask some hard question, like how does she intend to take up Charlie’s mission while maintaining a family. (Answer: the Lord will help her do it, and, anyway TPUSA is not a job, but her family.) When asked how she was able to trust God in the “midst of unfair and immense suffering,” Erika cites the story of Job, who was made by God to suffer for no good reason, but in the end came out okay simply because Job prayed for his friends, which made the angry God change His mind. I have never understood the point of that story, but theologians have tied themselves in knots trying to interpret it in a way that puts God in a good light.

Kirk’s views are all summed up in her answer to Weiss’s question about how she met Charlie. Erika responds that the Lord helped her to find Charlie in a job interview, and Erika asked God if Charlie was the right guy. He was, for, as Erika says, “If I remain in the jetstream of God’s will, then he will provide for you.”  And that’s pretty much her answer to every question in the town hall.

This was not a good first foray of Weiss into t.v. journalism, but surely things will improve as Weiss interviews people who don’t cling to superstition. But the goddiness of this show struck me as overbearing and unevidenced, and I hope religion is not a frequent “Town Hall Topic”.

One more note before I get to the video. Variety weighed in on the Town Hall, and not in a positive way; click to read:

The content:

During a Saturday-night town hall led by Bari Weiss, the recently named editor in chief of CBS News, most of Madison Avenue sought an off-ramp.

The program featured an in-depth interview with Erika Kirk, the CEO of the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA and the widow of Charlie Kirk, the group’s former leader. He was assassinated during one of the organization’s events at Utah Valley University, throwing a harsh spotlight on the political and cultural divides present in the U.S.

The event marked a new offering from CBS News. The organization does not typically host town halls or debates on trending issues or with newsmakers. And the choice of Weiss as moderator also raised eyebrows, because in most modern TV-news organizations, senior editorial executives remain off camera, rather than appearing in front of it.

More may be on the way. During the program, Weiss told viewers that “CBS is going to have many more conversations like this in the weeks and months ahead, so stay tuned. More town halls. More debates. More talking about the things that matter.” That would suggest CBS is planning to devote more hours to the programs.

The news special aired at 8 p.m. on Saturday, one of the least-watched hours in broadcast TV. And that may have contributed to a relative dearth of top advertisers appearing to support the show. During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.

Now, after that long introduction, here’s the video. Feel free and encouraged to weigh in below.