Extraordinary Claims

by Luther Reads

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The priest claims to own one car, and the bartender believes him. The minister claims to own four cars, but the bartender is skeptical until the minister brandishes a photograph of himself standing in front of a house and four cars. The rabbi then pulls out a photograph of himself standing in front of 400 cars and claims to own them all, but the bartender says, "You're gonna need more than a picture of yourself with 400 cars to convince me that they're all yours."

If you're expecting a punch line, there isn't one. So in a way, the joke's on you :)

The story is instead a parable meant to illustrate that extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary proof. Believing that a person owns one car requires almost no proof because it's an ordinary claim. But owning 400 cars is an extraordinary claim that warrants a far different level of proof.

I was told two extraordinary claims in my youth.

1. The Earth rotates around the sun, a belief known as heliocentrism. This is such a ridiculous claim because I can literally see the sun moving through the sky every day. The sun appears to move, not us. But yet I was told otherwise.

2. Two thousand years ago, the creator of the universe was born to a virgin, with himself as the father, and the subsequent brutal murder of this offspring allowed him to invite those of us who believe this story to come live with him for eternity with no more death or sadness.

Now what if, in a shocking twist, the bartender then claims to own four million cars, and all the other customers in the bar attest to it. And so do all the people walking down the street in front of the bar, and all the people in all the other bars along that street.

This is what it's like to be raised as a heliocentric Christian. Everyone around me believed that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that Jesus was born of a virgin and died for our sins. So as a child, I accepted both ideas.

But I also did something even more harmful, and this is the role of indoctrination. After hearing these claims so many times from so many people that I loved and trusted, I accepted the claims as being... ordinary. And ordinary claims only warrant ordinary proof.

But heliocentrism and Christianity are both very, very, very extraordinary claims. And I've found extraordinary proof for one but not the other.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a poet who's never actually written a poem.

Atheists, Christians, Foxholes, and Pandemics

by Luther Reads

Let me set the scene:

It's March 2020, and we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Apparently, somebody in Wuhan, China got too close to an animal carrying something called a "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" virus, and two months later we're all at risk of getting Dat Rona virus.

The NBA has canceled its season over concerns about spreading the coronavirus. Colleges and universities have cancelled classes. Governors have closed public schools for weeks. Travel bans are being put in place. Cruise ships are not being allowed to dock. Self quarantining is a thing. People are emptying grocery stores of Lysol wipes and, oddly enough, toilet paper.

Churches are even closing their doors. Remember all those old sayings about "corporate" prayer and forsaking not the gathering of the saints? I guess they didn't mean during a pandemic. The Catholic church is abandoning the use of holy water. Yes, the holy water that priests pray over. Yes, the holy water that symbolizes the protection of Jesus Christ. I guess it can't protect against a pandemic.

But you know what isn't closing and what isn't canceled? The science labs that are working on cures, vaccines, and tests for the coronavirus. I used to hear that there are no Atheists in a foxhole. The assertion being that when bullets are flying, everybody prays to someone. Well, I wonder if there are any Christians during a global pandemic. The assertion being that... well, you get it.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads builds robots. He doesn't want his robots to take anyone's job, but he knows this is unavoidable. Yet he toils on. He is very human in this regard -- a walking contradiction.

"I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual"

by Luther Reads

A few years ago, church goers openly mocked the non church goers who said, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." The church goers thought that phrase was an excuse to be lazy and stay home from church. But now the phrase isn't being ridiculed because so many people finally realize that churches are problematic for a lot of people.

More and more people see the deep flaws baked into the church hierarchy and structure, so much so that calling a Christian "religious" is like cursing them out. The rampant pettiness, cliquishness, legalism, and judgementalism among religious people has become too much. People backstabbing each other for positions, mismanagement of funds, abuse of power, misinterpretation of scripture, false spiritualism, etc, etc, and another etc. A thousand et ceteras, actually. Church folk be trippin!

A pastor friend of mine once defended this kind of behavior by saying that churches are still full of humans. He said, "People accept that kind of behavior at their job, but are shocked and disappointed to see it at church even though we're all still human." I thought the purpose of Christianity, and therefore church, is to make better humans out of us. So if church folk don't behave any better than the people at my job, I'd say that's a poor advertisement for attending church. But I digress.

Here's what I don't understand about the "spiritual" people, because many of them still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Who do they think wrote the Bible? Who do they think compiled the Old and New Testament? Who do they think controlled the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus for thousands of years? The church! The religious people. The backstabbers, abusers, and misinterpretors. If the church's hierarchy is problematic now, then it was problematic back then. Ain't nothing changed. Jewish leadership compiled the Old Testament, and Catholic leadership compiled the New Testament.

"But God!" they say. Most Bible readers believe that God intervened in the development of scripture to keep it free from humanity's foolishness. Okay, so is God still doing that? Because I can write my own interpretation of the Bible, sell it on Amazon, and God won't stop me. The Quran and Book of Mormon are both attributed to God and he didn't stop them. Christians believe that free will was given to all humans, even the religious people who wrote and translated Bibles, and shaped the story of Jesus. Any biases, selfishness, and pettiness that they harbored went right into the Bible.

But don't take my word for it, read the book for yourself. From rampant chauvinism and patriarchy to the burning alive of non believers, it's all in there and it's quite messy. But above all else, it's predictably very human.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads has recently come to terms with the staying power of the Oxford comma.

As a Father and a Scientist...

by Luther Reads

The comedian Chris Rock once memorably (although not hilariously, to me) suggested that his primary role as a father of daughters is to ensure that they don't end up on the pole... the stripper pole.

As a scientist, my primary role as a father is to keep my kids out of cults. That's my nightmare, as it would be the source of my eternal shame.

My parents and most of my family practice a very moderate and loving iteration of Christianity, but buried under layers of warm hugs and family worships are some very dangerous ideas:

• We will not always understand why we do certain things.
• We believe things even when faced with evidence to the contrary.
• We will receive our reward in the afterlife.

You know who else speaks this way? Cult leaders!!! So fast forward 15 years from now, and one of my daughters tells me that she's dropping out of school or selling all her stuff to join a fellowship of believers led by some clown in a toga. If all her life I've praised the virtues of relying on faith and ignoring evidence, what recourse do I have? If she doesn't understand the value of evidence in comparison to faith, I might as well kiss her goodbye.

Christianity isn't just a way of life, but it's also a way of thinking about evidence, facts, and our feelings. It would be awesome if we could trust our faith and our feelings to protect us from harmful cults and ridiculous beliefs, but we have enough, uhhh... evidence... to know that isn't true. People fall for dumb ass doctrines all the time, but not my daughters dammit! They will learn that evidence, logic and reason can help us to overcome our biases and narrow perspective of the world.

These tools force us to reconcile what feels true with what is known about the world as observed through more objective lenses. And if they understand that, they can work all the poles they want.


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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a scientist. Well, he's actually an engineer, but they're also scientists, right? *draws Venn diagram*