Godless Read Free

my philosophical reasons for unbelief. While Refuting God gives simple, thumbnail responses to most theistic arguments, Cosmological Kalamity (which you are welcome to skim if philosophy is not your cup of tea) shows how I deal in depth with one of those arguments.
     
    Part 3, What’s Wrong With Christianity, critiques the bible (its reliability as well as its morality) and the historical evidence for Jesus. Biblical Contradictions gives a brief list of discrepancies, but Understanding Discrepancy takes one of these into greater depth, showing that we skeptics are not simply rattling off shallow lists.
     
    Part 4, Life is Good!, comes back to my personal story, taking a case to the United States Supreme Court, dealing with personal trauma and experiencing the excitement of Adventures in Atheism.
     
    This is a great time to be an atheist. The polls show that “nonreligion” is the fastest growing religious identification in the United States. In Europe, after centuries of religious strife, most of the people are secular and the ornate churches are empty. That seems to be happening on this continent, too. The corner is slowly being turned. College students, as a group, are the least religious demographic in the nation. Hundreds of secular freethinking campus organizations are sprouting up as evidence of this impending—and I say welcome—change. The phenomenal success of atheist books such as Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Richard Dawkins’ international blockbuster, The God Delusion, shows that there is a hunger for reason, science and true human morality.
     
    I am convinced there is also restlessness among the clergy and in the pews. (See the many former ministers and priests I talk about in Chapter 18.) My story is one example of what can happen when the superstitions of the past are put under the bright light of reason. I hope Godless will be helpful to atheists and agnostics who are looking for ways to talk with religious friends and relatives, but my real desire is that a Christian reader will finish this book and join us.
     
    —Dan Barker
     
    Freedom From Religion Foundation
ffrf.org
     
     
    A NOTE ON WORD USAGE
     
    The style of this book is not to capitalize “bible” unless it is a specific bible, such as the King James Bible, or when it appears capitalized in a quote by a believer.
     
     

PART 1
     
    Rejecting God
     

Chapter One
     
    The Call
     
    When I was 15 I received a “call to the ministry.” It happened one evening in late 1964 during a week of revival meetings at Anaheim Christian Center in Anaheim, California. This was during the start of the Charismatic Movement—a slightly more respectable and less frenetic Pentecostalism within mainline churches that today sports hundreds of independent churches and loose associations of congregations around the world, but at that time appeared as a wild, exciting, uncrystallized phenomenon that woke up a lot of dull congregations. My parents, after years of mostly fundamentalist Christianity, had gotten involved with the Charismatic Movement because they were attracted to the “living Gospel,” where the presence of God seemed more real, immediate and powerful than in traditional worship services.
     
    The meetings at that “spirit-filled” church were intense, bursting with rousing music and emotional sermons. Believers did not sit passively praying in pews. Weeping worshippers waved their arms to heaven. Some fell prostrate to the floor, in submission to the Creator. People stood to speak in tongues, and others translated the “heavenly language” into English. Some practiced faith healing, prophecy, discernment (diagnosis of problems, such as “evil spirits”) and other “gifts of the spirit” that accompany being “baptized in the Holy Spirit.” It was a night that changed my life.
     
    I had already been “saved.” My