[Excerpt by John W. Loftus]

As the editor of this book I envisioned it as an extension of my previous one, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), which I think of as important background reading for the chapters in this one, although you don’t need to read it in order to understand and benefit from this present book. All the themes in this present book expand on issues raised there. I personally think this book delivers a powerful blow to Christianity, especially when combined with its predecessor. Someone has to tell the emperor he has no clothes on. These two books help to do just that.

 In part 1 David Eller, Valerie Tarico, Jason Long, and I elaborate and defend my Outsider Test for Faith, which calls upon believers to examine their culturally given faith from the perspective of an outsider, with the same level of skepticism they use to examine the other religious faiths they reject. Eller does so from an anthropologist’s perspective, while Tarico and Long do so from the perspective of psychology. Eller argues that there is no such thing as Christianity. There are only local Christianities, since Christianity is a cultural phenomenon that is both affected by its culture and it turn affects the culture in which it thrives. Among other things Tarico argues that the sense of certainty that faith gives believers is a psychological malaise. Long shows us from several different studies that we human beings are often irrational and gullible people. Then I revisit the argument by defending it from additional criticisms. I happen to think such a test is devastating to believers who think Christianity, or any other so called revealed religion, is true.

 In part 2 are chapters related to the Bible as God’s word. Edward Babinski goes into detail about the flat-earth, three-tiered cosmology we find in it. Paul Tobin then surveys what Biblical scholarship tells us about the rest of the Bible. It is inconsistent with itself, not supported by archaeology, contains fairy tales, failed prophecies, and many forgeries. Then I argue that since the Bible was used by the church to justify some horrific deeds, God did a poor job of communicating his will in it. This is what I call the Problem of Miscommunication. The Bible cannot be God’s word in any meaningful sense at all.

 In part 3 are two chapters related to the problem of evil. Hector Avalos takes aim at Paul Copan’s attempt to justify Yahweh’s actions in the Old Testament, which utterly fail. Then I argue there is no good reason for the amount of animal suffering in the world if there is a perfectly good God. These two chapters show convincing reasons why the Judeo/Christian view of God is indefensible.

 Part 4 contains chapters that question what Christians believe about Jesus. Robert Price deals with Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd’s book The Jesus Legend and finds their whole methodology wrong. Richard Carrier applies my Outsider Test for Faith to the New Testament stories about a resurrected Jesus. Then I argue that at best Jesus is to be understood as a failed apocalyptic prophet, since the prophesied new age (or eschaton) never occurred in his generation as predicted. Together in one way or another, we show that what Christians believe about Jesus is not the case, to say the least.

Finally, in part 5 are chapters arguing that modern society does not depend on Christianity for morality or science. David Eller shows us how human morality arose. We don’t need a god to explain morality, so consequently there is no moral lawgiver, and no argument from morality to the existence of God. If God wrote a moral code within us, he did so in invisible ink. Hector Avalos decisively answers the claim that atheism was the cause of the atrocities of Hitler. In fact, centuries of Christian anti-Semitism were more to blame for the Holocaust. Then Richard Carrier closes the book by effectively arguing that Christianity is not to be credited with the rise of science. He compiles a massive amount of material showing that Greek science was blossoming way before Christianity arose on the scene.

I want to sincerely thank each and every contributor to this volume in hopes that our combined efforts will make a difference. I think every chapter is significant and insightful, all written for the college-level reader, for the most part. Richard Carrier did a yeomen’s job with peer-reviewed comments on each one of the chapters, which has made this a better book.