Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat

If a guy says that he's going to make a rational argument, but then he actually says that he could make a rational argument, but he's not going to, does that make it logic?Chapter 8 of the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat, has the title chapter, A Case Study: Why I am a Christian, but it isn't a case study. It's just Ross Douthat, the author, writing a bunch of stuff, kind of almost at random about what he thinks about his own religion, which is a kind of Christianity, Roman Catholicism. The chapter might as well be called why I am Roman Catholic.Let me take you to pages 190 and 191. In these pages, Ross Douthat is trying to tell you that you should be a Christian, and in fact, you should be a Roman Catholic, but he's not going to tell you why. He's not going to tell you exactly why you should, but you just should believe him.He could make that argument, he says.Let me just give you Ross Douthat’s words here.“Since this isn't a work of Catholic polemic. I'm not going to go through those doctrines one by one and defend each one's fittedness to reality.”Oh, really? This is not a work of Catholic polemic? That's all that it is.Why bother to write a book about why you should believe, only to announce at the end that you're not going to go through and actually compare the doctrines that you want people to believe in with reality.Ross Douthat is telling you here that he's not going to even try to explain why the religion he's telling you that you should be a part of matches reality at all.How is that reasonable? How is that rational? How is that logical? It's not.It's Ross Douthat all but admitting that he has no ability to justify his religion.Look, this book is just a little bit over 200 pages. He has room. He could write another 50 pages in which he's talking about the doctrines of his religion.This is a chapter that is supposedly dedicated to why you should be a Christian, and he's not even really writing about why you should be a Christian.Then we come to the really specific stuff, which, again, he does not have the rationale to support. He just asks you to believe.“I think there are many visions and miracles and compelling mystical experiences that speak to the credibility of Christianity. Further, there are some specific arenas where I could make a case that Christianity, generally, and Catholicism, especially seem to exert unusual power relative to other spiritual traditions, over certain inhuman seeming forces, (Yes, I'm talking about demonology, and the occult, reading deeply about possession, and exorcism, or talking to people involved in the more intense cases is one of the best ways to inspire yourself to get to Sunday Mass every week) but I do not have a complex regression analysis to prove that Christianity gets you more miracles, more healings, more super than all its major rivals.”Ross Douthat is saying he thinks that, boy, there are a whole bunch of supernatural thingies that really give Christianity credibility, but he can’t prove it, actually.Here at the end of his book, Ross Douthat’s writing just falls apart into blathering nonsense. He says that he's going to tell us why he's a Christian, and why we should be Christians too. Then he says, well, he could go get the evidence, he could go get the facts, he could go get the proof that his religion is better than anyone else's except, well, he didn’t bring it with him, and he’s not going to do that right now because he’s not going to be polemic, you know, but still, you should believe and everyone on earth should believe this religion.This is not a book that engages in rational discussion. It's a desperate floundering around for any kind of justification for belief in absolutely nutty things like the belief that there are evil spirits that are gonna get you if you don't obey the priests, if you don't do what the churches tell you to do.That is the most lame, pathetic, childish attempt at social control that I have ever seen. You know what's even worse than that? For 60% of the American population, it works.Not everyone believes Ross Douthat, but as for the rest of you: Why, why does anyone believe a word that comes out of Ross Douthat’s mouth?

What do you do when a religious authority is abusing you?What do you do, if you believe that the creator of the universe has specific demands about the way that you lead your life, and specifically about your religious community, your religious beliefs?What do you do if you are trapped in a universe with a divine dictator ho is going to punish you with never ending pain if you get it wrong?Well, you write a book like, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat. That's what you do.We are getting close to the end of this podcast because this podcast is just about one book and it's not a very long book. It's just a little bit over 200 pages, and honestly, it's kind of fluffy toward the end.All of the things that Ross Douthat is writing about at the end of this book presume that you have agreed to his profoundly weak arguments that he makes at the beginning of the book about why you should be religious and really why you should be Christian in particular.We are now on pages 179 and 180. That's almost at the end. On these pages in particular, Ross Douthat is bringing up concepts of punishment in a strange and not very self-aware kind of way.The main idea that Ross Douthat is talking about in this of the 7th chapter, with the title, The End Of Exploring, the main idea is that if you happen to belong to a religion just because your parents taught you that you have to belong to that religion, that's fine. If you just are following along with what you were told to do as a child, that's just fine. Don't worry about it. God is gonna be totally cool with that.But then Ross Douthat opens up the next section of the chapter with these words:“This advice doesn't apply, indeed, it's useless or perverse, if your experience with your ancestral faith was miserable or punishing or abusive.”So, according to Ross Douthat, you should belong to a religion, you should just follow along and go ahead and just conform to what you've been told to believe, just believe what you were raised to believe. You don't have to question it too much.First of all, Ross Douthat is going 180 degrees in the opposite direction of what he promised us at the beginning of the book. He promised us he was going to give us a rational, reasonable, logical approach to understanding religion, and now he's saying, just don't think about it too much. Stick with what you’ve got. Don't question it too hard.However, Ross Douthat has one exception to that rule: If your religion is punishing, miserable and abusive, that doesn't count. Don’t follow along in those circumstances.That’s awkward, because, just two paragraphs before, Ross Douthat wrote about how his Christian god is going to punish you for failing to conform.“You will not be penalized for failing to reach the same exact destination as your neighbor in the course of your spiritual or moral journey. The punishment is reserved for refusing to choose or act period, for believing in a God, or universe that will punish you for taking any steps at all.”Ross Douthat is saying that the people who are going to be punished by God are those who refuse to join religion. Those who refuse to join, those who refuse to believe in these religious organizations that they're told to join when they're children, those who refuse to conform to the social order of the churches or the temples, will be punished. Ross Douthat tells us that people who refuse to obey human religious leaders, will be punished by God.Then, two paragraphs later, Ross Douthat says you shouldn't join in with a religion that is punishing or abusive.Under Christianity, the entire universe as Ross Douthat describes it is one in which the only reason people do anything is because there is an all-powerful magical spirit, a god, who controls it all and is going to punish or abuse you if you don't do what it tells you to do.Ross Douthat is describing his own religion as punishing and abusive.We know that children are raised to be religious using threats. They are told at an early age that if you don't do what the church says, and if you don't do what that priest says, when he takes you to that secret little place in the Catholic church, and if you don't believe, if you don't conform like Ross Douthat is telling you to, you're going to burn. You're going to be punished. You're going to be tortured by God.Oh, what a loving God, who is going to torture you if you refuse to go along.You're going to be punished, punished and abused, punished and abused.You know what's really funny? As we read ahead a few pages later, in the beginning of chapter 8, Ross Douthat finally acknowledges that the Roman Catholic Church has been abusing people.“I can understand why the entanglements that Catholicism has accumulated, the long history of corruptions make it hard for many people to believe in the church as a divinely founded institution, certainly 25 years of sex abuse revelations have given me a much clearer sense of the church's institutional failings than I had when I converted. Perhaps foolishly, my own impulse still runs in the opposite direction. The sins of Catholicism seem inseparable from its sheer significance in history. It's in-the-arena influence on civilizations.”So what he's saying here is, yeah, sure, the Roman Catholic Church is punishing and abusive, but it's powerful. The power of Roman Catholicism is what attracts Ross Douthat. He loves looking at the power.Ross Douthat can't even go nine pages without contradicting himself. I mean, he says that you shouldn't belong to an abusive religion, but then he's admitting the abuses of the Catholic church. Ross Douthat say, you shouldn't belong to an abusive religion, but then he says he belongs to the Roman Catholic Church because it's politically powerful, and he finds that power attractive.This kind of simpering attitude, this kind of moral hypocrisy when it comes to punishment, and the way that it's all centered around social power, is what turns off so many people from religion.It’s a huge red flag. It shows that the people who are in this religion are not motivated by some actual relationship with some actual invisible spiritual being who somehow sets down a divine law.This religion looks like it's organized around social control, and conformity, and political power, just putting the face of the supernatural woo woo on top of that, asking us to be gullible fools, to keep on belonging and participating and supporting religious organizations that abuse and punish us, that make us miserable.No, Ross Douthat not everybody's going to go along with that. Not everyone believes.

Ross Douthat ends chapter 6 of his book Believe by presuming that allowing celibate priests to control the details of people’s sex lives is a normal thing that people should have no trouble agreeing to. How does Douthat not see how weird that is? Does he think we don't remember how the Catholic Church helped its priests to sexually abuse little children?Oh, Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat wrote this book called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. In this book, he's arguing that, of course, everyone should be religious, but also specifically that they should be Christian. That Christian focus pervades his entire book. He shows a great deal of ignorance about non-Christian religions, and just ignores them a lot of the time, while referring to the Christian God over and over again..We're getting now to the end of chapter 6 of this book by Ross Douthat. This podcast is dedicated to reading through this one book by Ross Douthat, to examine whether it holds up to rational scrutiny. That's the threshold that Ross Douthat himself set down for evaluation of his book. The claim that he made was that he was going to write a book that would convince people through reason, rationality, logic.He doesn't actually use logic in this book. On page 168 through 170, the last 3 pages of chapter 6, we’re going to see exactly how illogical his book is, how immense the gaps in his logic are.This chapter is called Three Stumbling Blocks. In this chapter, Ross Douthat is claiming to address 3 of the major objections to Christianity or to religion in general.he thing is, there are many more stumbling blocks, many more objections to Christianity and to religion in general than just these three.Anyway, we're on the third stumbling block. The first was, why does God do so many terrible things, although, actually, Ross Douthat phrased it as, “why does God allow terrible things to happen”?Then the third one was, why do religious institutions do so many terrible things? Those first two stumbling blocks Ross Douthat failed to adequately address.The final stumbling block is this: Why are traditional religion so hung up on sex?Once again, Ross Douthat is focusing on what he calls major religions, the big religions. He dismisses out of hand any religion that doesn't have very many followers. Douthat argues that a religion must not be worth looking at if it's not popular, if it doesn't have social dominance.With the religious practice of social dominance, we get into what's really underneath this question of sex. It's not just about sex, it's about social control, and that is the stumbling block that Ross Douthat doesn't want to address: Why is Christianity in particular and why are religions in general so hung up on establishing social control? Why do they control people's private lives so much?Ross Douthat wants to make it just about sex. In doing so, he's appealing to the prude in Christian religion who regards it as absolutely natural that sex should be controlled and doesn't want to think about other forms of social control.Controlling sex is perfectly fine for these people, though. For a lot of Christians, sex is the gateway drug to broader social control. That's what we see in a lot of religious communities, large and small, whether you want to call them churches or you want to call them cults. They control your sexual activity, and by doing that, they control your life.Ross Douthat doesn't really talk about that problem, but what he does talk about is kind of weird, and it's illogical. The following selection is from the bottom of page 168 to the top of 169 in his book.“Once you accept that the universe was probably made with us in mind, that there is some cosmic purpose to human consciousness and human lives, then why wouldn't God or the cosmos care about the most important way that human beings bond with one another, create the most intimate, and the most sprawling intergenerational forms of community, and participate in the creation of new life? It would be a strange god, indeed, who cared intensely about how we spend our money, or what votes we cast, or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances, or terrible ones or form a lifelong bond or an addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate them permanently.”In other words, if God cares about anything at all, hen God has to care about sex. But where do we start out?Notice, what is the solid point, the premise that Ross Douthat thinks he has firmly proven? First of all, he thinks he's established that there is a God even though that's not been established.Douthat is saying that if you accept the idea that the universe was made with humanity in mind, then you kind of have to assume that the universe was made specifically so that we could have sex only under certain circumstances. Wow.What Ross Douthat is saying is that the universe was made for sex, but only some kinds of sex. Douthat is saying that the universe is a sex dungeon, where there is a universal cosmic dominator, a guy with a whip, and he's ready to punish you and torment you. It's a torture prison designed for sex, but only the kind of sex that its master says that you can have. That is really pretty damned kinky, but it's also illogical.What were the grounds for the idea that Ross Douthat had that the universe was made so that people could exist, that the universe was made for people, and that there's a purpose to human consciousness? The grounds for that idea were that there is a mathematical observation of certain patterns in the universe, that there are certain mathematical patterns and that they work because we observe them in the universe. Ross Douthat thinks that this fact logically establishes that the universe must have been created by a magical being in order to create people, and to have people lead certain kinds of lives.What about the purpose of human consciousness, and the believe that consciousness is somehow related to a god? The only evidence Ross Douthat could produce for that is that consciousness is mysterious, and scientists haven't figured out everything about it yet. That’s itRoss Douthat is essentially saying is that because there are mathematical constants that have been observed by scientists in the universe, and because scientists haven't explained everything about consciousness yet, there must be a magical being who wants to be, and deserves to be, in control of the very specific sexual activities that you engage in.It really doesn't follow. That's not a logical argument. Physics doesn't dictate the kind of sex that we have, at least not in the sense of anything religious. The existence of a constant speed of light in the universe doesn't mean that you're not supposed to have sex with your boyfriend or your girlfriend. It doesn't mean that churches get to decide who you go out with and how and who you get married to. It doesn't follow rationally.Nonetheless, Ross Douthat goes on to say, if that's not enough for you, if you reject his argument that the rules of physics and the mathematical observations of the universe indicate that the Roman Catholic Church should have control of your sex life, if you don't believe that, well, just take a look around you at the suffering and the terrible things that are happening in society because people are not obeying the Pope, and the bishops and the cardinals and the priests, about sex, not following their commands. Look at what's just happening because of that!Some people are not having children. That, for Ross Douthat, is justification for giving control over your sex life to priests in the Catholic Church. Seriously, that's the argument that Ross Douthat is making. Not enough people are having babies, and therefore, Catholic priests should be given control and should be able to forbid you from masturbating.Yeah, that's that's pretty wild.Let's take on this idea that fewer people having children is a social ill. If we take a look at what actual suffering is created in the world, a lot of it is created by overpopulation. We have finite resources on a finite planet, and they are quickly being used up, and the use of those resources is creating massive amounts of pollution and social inequality. Then there's climate change, which may end up absolutely devastating ecosystems around the world in a way that may take millions of years to repair. A lot of that is happening because we have too many babies, more babies than we can take care of.Babies are lovely and cute, a lot of the time they are. I have children. I love my children, but not everybody wants to have children. Not everybody feels that they would be good parents or that parenthood is something that would be good for them.If we give back control, to Christian religion, if we go back in history, we know what that looks like. We know that that means that people will be married off against their will. They will not be allowed to end their pregnancies, but they will also not be allowed to practice contraception. Remember, Ross Douthat's church forbids contraception.So, under Ross Douthat’s plan, the church decides who you get married to and who you have sex with. The Bible declares that if you have sex outside of that, you get pummeled with stones and beaten to death. You're not allowed to practice contraception, so that you can’t control  the number of children you have, or the time you have your children.That's what Ross Douthat argues is a social good, and he's saying it’s a good thing because we don't have enough children.We currently have over 8 billion people on the earth.People are not lacking. We're not about to go extinct. The population is still growing.So what's the problem exactly that Ross Douthat is talking about? Actually, he doesn't it explain in this book. He doesn’t explain what the problem is with people not having children.Next, Ross Douthat tries to do a judo argument. He writes that in recent years, thanks to the sexual revolution, fewer people are having sex. Isn't that bad? Don't you think people should be having sex more?It’s weird because what Ross Douthat was arguing before that people are having too much sex, yet now he's observing that people aren't having sex enough.You just can't win with this argument. Either you're having too much sex or you're having too little sex, or both things are true. People are having too many babies out of wedlock, and people are not having enough babies.The one common thread throughout all this is that people are having sex in the way that they want to have sex, and not in the way that priests want them to have sex. Ross Douthat argues in favor of priests deciding how you have sex, who you have sex with, when you have sex, when you have babies, what your family looks like. They want to control everything about your life. That's what this is about. It's not about looking at the evidence of what's good for people or what's not good for people.Then, at the end of this chapter on page 170, Ross Douthat wraps up this chapter by arguing that you might disagree with a lot of what religion has to say about sex, but hey, maybe religion gets one or two things right about sex, and therefore, shouldn't you follow religion and believe in religion?Here's what he says:“If the traditional emphasis on chastity and monogamy and marriage, the broadly shared consensus of the world's religions, (again, the world's religions being the big ones, not all of them) if that deserves critique or required some adaptation, if it leads to bigotries, cruelties, unjust discrimination, while it may also contain important wisdom, that you can't simply sweep under the brush of Puritanism or patriarchy. I submit, that acknowledging that important possibility, making that concession is all you need to enter sincerely into the exploration of a traditional religious faith.”Ross Douthat is arguing that yes, there's been bigotry, cruelty, unjust discrimination, and a whole lot of other bad things that come out of the church controlling your sex life. It's true, but you know, don't you think that maybe it might be possible, possible that the church might be right about one or two things when it comes to sex? Therefore, you should just believe and follow everything that the church tells you to do in your sex life.This is like a con artist coming up to you and saying:“Okay, it's true. I have been in prison several times for defrauding people. Yes, I've been found guilty of exploiting people, selling them into slavery, punching them in the face. Yes, it's all true.There was that investigation in the newspaper last week, where yes, I was found to be ripping off people using new online methods to drain money from their accounts without their permission. Sure, yes, that's true, but don't you think that maybe, maybe there's a possibility that this scheme I'm telling you about today might make you a lot of money, and don't you think that you just should believe what I'm telling you? Because there's a possibility, that's enough for you, isn't it?”No, it's not enough. It's not enough for us to give up control of our private sex lives in great detail, with no masturbation, no contraception, no birth control, and the church telling us who to marry, and how many babies we can have?No, it’s not worth it, Ross Douthat, because there is a track record of remarkable, repeated sexual abuse, not just from Catholic churches, but from Protestant churches too.There is no evidence that there is any God, and even if there was evidence that there is a God, there is no evidence that any God actually wants to have any kind of sex in particular going on between people. There's no evidence of this at all. Ross Douthat has completely failed to show that anything like that exists.Even if that god exists, I would tell him to back the hell off because it's not anyone else's business, what goes on between two consenting adults.That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.

Nebrd31b ProtoTextThere is a book, written by Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat is a right wing extremist, Christian political commentator.The title of his book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. At the core of the book is the claim that everyone should believe in religion, without exception. Ross Douthat believes that all people should do the same thing.This podcast stands for the opposite idea. That’s why this podcast is called Why Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This podcast is dedicated to the idea that we must all be free to seek out truth as we find it, not to surrender our free will under the belief that other people must see better, think better, know better than we do. While Ross Douthat worships conformity to just one Truth, this podcast observes the truth that not everyone is willing to go along and meekly believe what they are told to believe.In this podcast, I read through Ross Douthat’s book, a book that Douthat wrote to support the agenda of Donald Trump and his Christian Nationalist allies to make Christianity the law of the land. Donald Trump says that the United States is a Christian nation. In order to promote Christianity above all else, Donald Trump brought American democracy to the brink of destruction. The political theology of Christianity, after all, is one of absolute authoritarianism.We find Ross Douthat struggling with this thoroughly documented involvement of Christian institutions in the worst of human depravity as we read on through chapter 6, in which Douthat claims to address three stumbling blocks to belief in Christian religion.As he writes about these stumbling blocks, Douthat merely sets up straw man versions of these. He fails to confront the most powerful objections of nonbelievers.The second stumbling block is really just a new version of the first stumbling block Douthat wrote about, which we discussed in the previous episode. That first stumbling block was: Why does God allow wicked things to happen?The second stumbling block that Ross Douthat identifies in this chapter is a subset of the general cruelty of Christianity: Why do religious institutions do so many wicked things?It's interesting that Ross Douthat doesn't get too specific about the wicked things that religious institutions do. He doesn't talk about, for example, Roman Catholicism's history of massive amounts of child abuse. Ross Douthat doesn’t mention the role of Catholic priests in enabling that abuse, covering it up, and resisting attempts to provide justice to the victims of Catholic violence.Ross Douthat doesn’t talk about the Catholic Church’s history shutting women up into convents involuntarily, and putting their children into cruel institutions where they were slowly starved to death. In these Catholic institutions, children without adequate heat and clothing, and weren’t given enough to eat. The results were predictable. Huge numbers of children died at the hands of purposefully neglectful priests and nuns. Mass graves containing the bodies of large numbers of children and infants who died in these Roman Catholic institutions have been discovered.Ross Douthat doesn’t name most of the brutalities that Christianity has inflicted upon its victims, and when he does, he avoids describing the scope of Christian cruelty.Every now and then, for example, Ross Douthat mentions the Spanish Inquisition. He doesn’t ever explain what it was, or what it involved.The Spanish Inquisition was a program of systematic religious violence organized by and perpetrated by the Catholic Church. It was related to similar programs of persecution that took place in other Catholic countries.The Spanish Inquisition took place after a bloody religious war through which Christians engaged in genocide against Muslims until not a single Muslim was left alive on the Iberian Peninsula.Next, the Spanish Catholic Church turned its hateful religious ideology against Jews, forcing Jews to flee Spain, to convert to Christianity, or to be tortured and killed. The Christian king and queen of Spain then sent ships across the ocean in order to torture, enslave, and kill more non-Christians, after robbing them of their lands and possessions.None of the barbaric Christian atrocities I’ve described so far were part of the Spanish Inquisition. No, they were merely precursors to the Spanish Inquisition.The Spanish Inquisition began after Spanish Jews were forced under the threat of violence to convert to Christianity. The trouble with converting people to a religion through force is that it’s difficult to believe in the sincerity of the conversion.How could the cruel Catholic rulers of Spain know for sure that the Jews they had threatened to kill had really become Christians, instead of just saying that they had converted to Christianity? Subtle minds might have pondered the implications of the superficiality of Christian faith, but the Christian rulers of Spain did not have subtle minds.They decided that torture and death were the answers. The Spanish Inquisition began as a way violent persecution of Spanish Jews who had converted to Christianity, to treat them horribly just in case they were fake Christians. The Inquisition went from town to town, seeking out Jews who failed to display sufficient amounts of Christian faith.A thought occurred to the Spanish Catholics as they tortured and killed Jews in the name of Jesus. No, they didn’t think to themselves that they were making their religion look bad. Instead, what they thought was: If Jews can fake being Christian in order to escape persecution by our Christian kingdom, other people might be faking their Christianity too.So it was that the Spanish Inquisition broadened in scope. Now, it wasn’t sufficient to be just any kind of Christian. If people were suspected of practicing the wrong kind of Christianity, they were branded as heretics, and were tortured until they confessed, and then killed.Historians disagree about the exact number of people the Christian kingdom of Spain brutally murdered during the Spanish Inquisition, but there is no doubt that there were large numbers of victims, enough to terrorize the entire population of the Iberian Peninnsula.The Spanish Inquisition inspired Christians all around the world to torture and kill their neighbors in the name of Jesus. In England, Bloody Mary burned Protestants at the stake. The Salem Witch Trials in the Colony of Massachusetts were a Protestant echo of Catholic brutality.Ross Douthat doesn’t discuss any of this. Even as he claims to be objecting to the suggestion that that Christian churches have done bad things, Ross Douthat fails to talk about the many bad things Christian churches have done. Ross Douthat doesn't get into the details of Christianity's systematic, centuries-long involvement in fraud, financial mismanagement, exploitation, murder, slavery.Ross Douthat doesn’t work well with conceptual subtleties. He believes in his religious lifestyle so wholeheartedly that he thinks that absolutely everyone should be like him, and be religious too.The simplicity of Ross Douthat’s religious thinking leads him to dismiss the dangers of religious belief without serious consideration of the long history of his religion’s involvement in systematic cruelty.In particular, Ross Douthat doesn't want to confront the relationship between fascism and Christianity.On page 163, Ross Douthat says, well, if you think that Christian violence is bad, well what about the brutality of the 20th century?Ross Douthat writes about,“Communism, nationalism, fascism, all causes untainted by the dogmas of revealed religion, and yet somehow, much more pitiless than the Christendom they overthrew.”So you think that Christian wars were bad? Well, what about the Communists? What about nationalists? What about fascists? They weren't Christian!With Communism, what Ross Douthat says is absolutely true. Communism is ideologically not Christian, not religious. Non-Christian Communism has been horrifically brutal in many places.The brutality of Communism, however, doesn't absolve Christianity of its problems.In this chapter, Ross Douthat engages in a form of whataboutism, an immature debating tactic. People who engage in whataboutism when they are unable to deal with an accusation. They attempt to distract from a valid accusation by turning it around, and saying, “What about the bad things other people have done?”This tactic of distraction is not rational. It’s not reasonable. The fact that Communism has been a problem, totalitarian, brutal, nasty, doesn't mean that Christianity is also not brutal and nasty. To make such an argument is a complete abandonment of logic.Communism was only one version of authoritarianism in the 20th Century, of course. The other 2 ideologies of the 20th Century that Ross Douthat identifies and says they have absolutely nothing to do with Christian ideology were Nationalism and Fascism.Nationalism and fascism often went together, by the way, and when they did, they had a hell of a lot to do with Christianity, actually.Fascism started in Italy as a Nationalist movement.It’s true that Benito Mussolini was a little bit of an opportunist early in his career. He tried on different kinds of ideologies, but eventually he settled on a Christian Nationalist Fascism that was friendly to Christianity, and was worked along with the Catholic Church to establish cruel Fascist control across all of Italy.In Germany, of course, there was Adolf Hitler, who was not an atheist. Over and over again, he said, no, I'm not an atheist. Of course I'm not.In fact, he based his slaughter of the Jewish people, wherever he went, millions and millions of them, the Holocaust on the Bible.Hitler based that on the example of Jesus in the gospels, when Jesus himself became violent, when he saw that people were changing money in the Temple of Jerusalem. The money changers were engaging in a religious practice that Jesus didn’t personally approve of. So, Jesus violently attacked the money changers in the name of his religion. Jesus grabbed a whip and he started to beat people in the temple, to drive them out.Adolf Hitler said that that violence by Jesus was the example that told him that he needed to go and kill the Jews, because the Jews were like the money changers in the temple. They were part of a Synagogue of Satan, Hitler said.That Synagogue of Satan accusation against Jews comes from Jesus, in the Christian New Testament Book of Revelation. Jesus came up with the idea that any Jews that don't follow him are nasty and are evil and are Satanic, and must be exterminated.That comes from the Christian holy book. The Nazis didn’t make it up from thin air. The Third Reich got the idea for the Holocaust from Christianity.Adolf Hitler made that connection explicit, in speeches where he explained that he was inspired by Jesus to kill the Jews.The Roman Catholic Church helped the Nazis as well. There's plain documentation of that.In Fascist Spain especially, Christianity and Fascism were one and the same. Spain is the place that classic fascism survived after World War II. It’s no accident that the country known for the Spanish Inquisition merged Christian Nationalism and Fascism most successfully, in a form that survived all the way up into the 1970s, 30 additional years under Francisco Franco, the Christian Fascist leader.Franco was Roman Catholic, and he used the Roman Catholic church and the church's desire to fight communists to justify his fascism.In fact, the Catholic Church in fascist Spain was an ally of the fascists, was used to control and sometimes in prison and sometimes murder people who were enemies of the fascist state.The Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei was in particular a part of this connection between fascism in Spain and Christianity. Fascism in Spain was Christian nationalist in the sense that we understand it in the United States of America today, saying that Spain is a Christian nation, and Spain is a fascist nation.We have to look at what's happening in the United States right now. Donald Trump is fascist. He's got secret police out on the streets, in masks, terrorizing citizens and non-citizens alike, putting people in prison, imprisoning people for doing things like reporting on protests, or engaging in peaceful protests, or daring to question what ice agents are doing out there? We've got concentration camps being set up. We've got terrible things going on in the United States. We're in emerging fascism right now. The ideology that's linked with Christian nationalism claims that the United States of America is a Christian nation.In 2016, in 2020, in 2024, and now in the midterm election of 2026, the polls of that are associated with these elections clearly show that the people who are voting for fascism to be established and to be continued and to be strengthened are overwhelmingly Christians.Christians are the majority of people who support fascism and that the majority of Christian voters are supporting fascism in the United States. Only minority of Christians are standing against fascismThe people in the United States who are standing most strongly against fascism and Christian nationalism are atheists.On page 163 of Ross Douthat’s book responds to these facts with a failed attempt at whataboutism, because most of the very political movements Douthat argues were more violent than medieval Christian governments were also Christian.As we see in our present day, experience and in the history of fascism in the 20th century. We see that actually Christianity is an integral part of fascism and nationalism, and the violent oppression that they engage with. You can't say that because Adolf Hitler killed a bunch of people, Christianity is to be absolved of its violence. It just doesn't make sense.What’s more, Christianity clearly fails its own moral standard. To be fair, it’s a fantastically impossible moral standard to uphold.Christianity doesn’t claim to be merely good. It claims to be morally perfect. It claims to embody a flawless moral vision that is as much an inherent feature of the universe as the speed of light. Given the infinite arrogance with which Christianity announces the transcendent perfection of its moral system, we should set a high bar for evaluating the truth of the religion’s claims.Christianity demands immense sacrifices from both individual people and society as a whole. Christian organizations and preachers routinely insist that their religion be granted an elite status above the law, and claim an exclusive right to the power to control people’s lives.Given the high stakes of Christianity’s hunger for power, it’s not enough for Christians to be morally equivalent, or even morally superior, to non-Christians. Christians claim to belong to a perfect religion that was invented by an all-powerful magician who is the very definition of moral goodness. If Christianity is to be believed, it must be morally perfect.Christianity is the farthest thing from moral perfection. Christianity often leads the way into cruel immorality, and that's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.

In the latest chapter of his book, Ross Douthat twists and turns to justify suffering as a good thing, because it comes from his god. He runs away from a confrontation with the brutal cruelty of the Christian deity, making excuses without any reasonable throughline.It's another episode of Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This podcast reads and examines, with a critical perspective, which means that we're not taking it for granted that the author is just right about everything. We're actually thinking about what's being said. We're examining the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. This is a book that's written by right wing Christian Nationalist extremist political commentator Ross Douthat.At every step along the way so far, Ross Douthat has failed to provide a rational kind of justification for his religious beliefs in particular and for religion in general.Now, we're going ahead to chapter 6, which has the title Three Stumbling Blocks. These are three stumbling blocks specifically for Christianity.It's a weird order for this to be covered in chapter 6 because Ross Douthat places his most concentrated argument for Christianity in his final chapter, but this comes first.That tells you everything you need to know about this book. The book is actually an argument for Christianity all the way through. In this chapter, Ross Douthat is attempting to make a demonstration that he is actually considering a few arguments against Christianity. That's why we have the title Three Stumbling blocks for this chapter.The 1st stumbling block that he's going to decimate, he's going to show why it's not an impediment at all, is this: Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things To Happen?That's the title, word for word: Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things To Happen? That phrasing of the title shows you what Ross Douthat is up to here.Ross Douthat is offering this objection to Christianity only in its most mild version. Actual objections to Christianity include a much stronger version, which is Why does God do so many wicked things to people?If there is a Christian God, why would anyone want to worship that God?Let's just put reality off to the side. Ross Douthat has already failed completely to provide any rational basis for belief in the reality of any God, much less the Christian God. Nonetheless, Douthat is now arguing that his Christian God is actually moral, even though this is a God that has all the power in the universe to make things right, and fails to do it.More than that, we have in the Christian text itself, throughout Old Testament and New Testament, many examples of the Christian God, doing things that are absolutely cruel, violent, and small-minded in its violence. This Christian God, at the end of the Christian New Testament, promises to do even worse, to kill off huge portions of humanity, the vast majority of humans on the planet, in really nasty ways, torturing them first, just so that this god can then rule over the earth.It's weird. It's violent. It’s a terrible moral example.Ross Douthat won't confront that objection to Christianity. Honestly, I mean, how could he?Instead, he's only dealing with this weaker question of like, why does God simply allow wicked things to happen? Why doesn't the Christian God stop other people from doing wicked things?At this point, Douthat brings up Christopher Hitchens, because, you know, another thing Douthat loves to do. He loves to restrict his ideas of atheism to what he calls the New Atheists, who are actually just a few recent atheists. There's no difference between New Atheism and plain old atheism anyway.Douthat is bringing up an argument that's been made by many people well before “New Atheists” came on the scene maybe 20 years ago. That argument is that if he Christian God is all powerful and bad things are happening, then therefore, the Christian God could stop those bad things, but chooses not to, therefore, this Christian God is either not all powerful or not all good.Of course, the most rational explanation is that the Christian god doesn't exist at all, simply because it's a ludicrous idea that there is a magical being who is invisible, who never shows up, but we're supposed to believe in anyway.Obviously, there's a lot of nastiness in the world. Why, if there's an all powerful and benevolent divinity who could undo at all, has this god chosen to keep all of humanity in pain?On page 155, Ross Douthat begins to attempt to respond to this long-lasting criticism of Christianity by talking about what the philosophical basis for making moral judgments.Ross Douthat questions the idea that human beings have the ability to judge what's good and evil. He says that this objection, “assumes that we can identify good and evil as meaningful categories at all, as exposed to just flags of convenience for things to instinctively favor and dislike.”Ross Douthat is arguing that if you only have human judgment about what is morally right or wrong, then it's just arbitrary, and human moral judgment is only a matter personal preferences and style. Douthat believes that humans somehow lack an ability to dictate what is absolutely true in morality in an absolute sense.He wants there to be a morality that is true on the level of gravity being true, that on Earth, at least, when we're on this planet, there is an up and a down that is defined by our distance from the center of the planet.(Our planet, by the way, is one that Christianity and its entire religion failed to comprehend the mere existence of as a planet, but we'll put that aside.)Let's respond to this idea that people don't have the ability to establish right and wrong in an absolute way that's anything like this sense of what Ross Douthat would call the laws of physics.Actually, this is a valid point. We do not have the ability to establish right and wrong in the sense of absolute certain objective truth. That's just how things are.What we can do is come up with philosophies and systems of thinking about what we would call right and wrong or good and bad.“Evil” is a weird word, if you think about it, because evil is an idea that something is inherently wicked, in the way that an apple is inherently red (or green, actually, if you look at green apples).It's a weird idea.Good and bad or right and wrong actually are subjective. Ross Douthat has a resistance to this idea because he's been brought up in a religion that teaches him that good and evil exists in the way that red and blue exist, like black and white exist, as if they are just parts of the universe, and they've been created by this magical creature that they call God.There's no evidence that that's actually happened. There's no evidence that there are immutable universal laws of morality.If you believe that morality is a True thing that has to exist in the world, well, I guess that's going to be a letdown for you, that you can't just have absolutely universal laws, that everybody has to obey and that apply to absolutely everybody in all circumstances, but there is no divine lawgiver. There is no evidence of any divine laws. There never has been any evidence that there ever have been any stone tablets inscribed by God himself with the words of laws that must be followed by absolutely everybody.Ross Douthat needs grow up a little bit. Cosmic laws delivered by magical creatures are not a solid basis of ethics.Ethics are about trying to establish through careful thought and reflection and empathy an understanding of what seems to be fair, what seems to be just, what seems to promote the well-being of the most people possible, understanding that not everyone wants the same thing.Some people want to do violence, and is it restricting a person's freedom to stop them from doing violence? Sure it is. So, yeah, there is some relativity to it. There is some subjectivity to it.Humans are subjects. Humans have subjectivity. Our minds are not machines, and there is no chemical code of good and evil in the world. So, get used to it.We have to come together as a society and to ask: What are we, as a group of people, willing to do, to try to support the well-being, the basic, fulfilled, meaningful, healthy, pain-free life, to the extent that's possible (because pain is a part of life)?Suffering is a part of life, not because that's right or wrong, but simply because it's a fact. We observe it, but let's try to make things better for the most people possible.We come together with philosophies about that suffering, taking different premises of what should be true, and what values should be placed at the center. They're always arguing with each other, and they always will because it's not like there's a scientific rightness or wrongness to any one of them.Ross Douthat can't cope with that. I guess that's his problem. He hasn't grappled with the reality of the world.What he’s trying to say that bother me is that we don't have the right to challenge what God has decided. He's presuming that there's a God. He's presuming that God's will is good, and then presuming that people are not good enough to to challenge that.If you take on that perspective, that we don't have the right to challenge the will of God, then really, what's the point of even making a rational or logical argument? There isn't any.Ross Douthat’s position boils down to a single command: You must obey the will of God. Ross Douthat believes there is a magical creature who has the right to command you, and you should do what that magical creature says. That's it.You don't have the right to think about this for yourself.If you don't have the right to think about morality and belief for yourself, why did Ross Douthat even write this book?I think that Ross Douthat wrote this book because he knows that actually, simply saying, “Just follow God and shut up” is not a very convincing argument, and it's not working.Think about that for a moment. Is the common failure to convince non believers of the existence of God itself evidence for the existence of God or evidence that God doesn't exist? God's own rules and commands are not compelling. People defy them all the time. If they were persuasive, more people would be Christians.If arguments for Christianity were sensible, were reasonable, they would be self-evident. No one would disagree with them.So, let’s ask this: Why is God such an inartful, outdated debater, persuader, communicator? There's something very odd about that.The very fact that we have to argue about religion, that someone like Ross Douthat has to be the voice of God, writing this book at all, is an indication of the weakness of the case for Christianity. Why should Ross Douthat’s book have to exist? Why doesn't God just come down and persuade us all himself?It could happen. This is an all powerful God, supposedly. So why is this God choosing not to do that?It's a weird kind of idea that God wants to be hidden and wants not to persuade people, but has made this magical book and this magical story, and we're all supposed to believe in the magic of people walking on water and resurrecting the dead and performing magic acts, and throughout this book, this god is appearing all over the place, but we’re also supposed to believe that he just doesn't do that anymore.Why? What changed? It's all really, really, really weird.Weirder still is the justification of Jesus. Jesus somehow is supposed to make all of this makes sense.Here's what Ross Douthat says about that on page 155.“Yes, the truest morality has been fully revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, his teaching and his example and his death. The doctrine of incarnation is an arguable answer to the problem of evil. Here is God himself, answering our laments by coming down to share in all our sufferings, and die in torture alongside us.”What does that have to do with anything? If there is a god. Who is torturing everybody, and then this God comes down for just like a very short amount of time, maybe 30 years, and has a little bit of a bad time, when really, the bad times have been going on for other people for hundreds of thousands of years, and will continue to go on for thousands of years more up to the present moment, well, so what? God is slumming it for a little bit, and that's supposed to make the problems that this God creates, and the torture that this God creates, and this world of pain and misery, it’s supposed to make all that okay?It's supposed to make that all the pain okay because God slummed it for a little bit? He came down to our level for a little bit just to say, “Hey, I get it, man. I'm not going to change anything. I'm not going to take away any pain or suffering, misery, but you know, hey, I get it, man. I'm totally relatable.”It's like the most cosmically insufferable youth pastor BS.Ross Douthat then begins to twist and turn desperately trying to find some way to explain why the Christian ideology that God is absolutely infinitely powerful and infinitely good makes no sense. He's trying to make it makes sense somehow, and he's even now beginning to say, well, maybe maybe it's not true.At this point in the chapter, Ross Douthat desperately turns to the idea that maybe you could have a god who is all powerful, but not all good. Or, maybe, you could have some kind of God who made the universe and is all good but just not all powerful.The problem with that rhetorical escape hatch is that these ideas are not what Christianity preaches is True. Ross Douthat wrote this book to try to justify Christianity, and the Christian doctrine is really clear. The Christian God is simultaneously, infinitely powerful, could do anything, could create a universe without any pain and suffering in which free will also could exist, and God could get everything that he wants, and everyone else could get what they want too. If the Christian God were real, the Christian God could do that, and there would have to be no pain. If you have an infinitely all powerful God, that is possible.On the other hand, if you have a God who is all powerful and doesn't do that, then that God is a piece of shit and doesn't deserve your worship. Thank goodness that God is not real, because if it was, we would all be living inside of the mind of a maniac.Finally, Ross Douthat retreats into a corner where I think he understands he's not making sense. So, he comes up with one final, desperate ploy.Ross Douthat says that it's actually offensive for us to say that that we should object to anything that God wants to do, even if it's painful, even if it's torture, even if it seems like it's the most brutal, nasty things are coming from the Christian God.It's offensive for you to point that out, Ross Douthat suggests. He says this is on page 158 at the bottom:“It seems also somewhat offensive for non-believers in a society like ours with life expectancies, lengthened, terrible diseases, conquered, and wealth piled up beyond human imagining, to lecture the inhabitants of the more deprived and painful human past on the naïveté of their greater religious faith.”First of all, let's talk about that claim of human wealth, beyond imagining. That wealth is held in the hands of just a few people, a small number of people like Jeff Bezos, like Elon Musk, like the executives at Microsoft and Apple. The inequality is astounding.Christianity is a cult of monarchy and monotheism. It's a worship of kings and the idea of having centralized power.Ross Douthat, of course, doesn't perceive that problem. He doesn’t see a problem with the inequality being created, that while a huge number of people are struggling to get by, Jeff Bezos is going around the world on his gigantic yacht and having a load of a time withholding billions upon billions of dollars from everybody else. It's just crazy.Let’s examine the rest of what Ross Douthat just said. Yes, life expectancy is lengthened, although under Donald Trump, life expectancies actually have gone down. Nonetheless, it’s true that life expectancies are longer compared to what they used to be.Who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for great diseases being conquered? Does it have anything to do with religion Nope. It doesn’t have a single thing to do with religion.In fact, if you believe that God created this world, God created those diseases. Now, there's no evidence that any god created this world. There's no evidence of any of that. Gods are not real, but if you believe in them, you’ve got to say, well, God created the world, and God created diseases, and God created viruses, and God created infectious bacteria, and GOd created nasty fungal infections too.You know who defeated those diseases? You know who lengthened the lifespan? Human medical scientists did.It wasn’t prayer. It wasn’t churches. It was irreligious science that brought about these improvements in the quality of life.Ross Douthat won't give credit to science. Ross Douthat won’t even agree to the basic biological facts of the human body. He doesn't even agree with, for example, biological evolution.If you don't accept the tenets of biological evolution through natural selection, then you don't understand how to control diseases because little pathogens have very short lifespans, and we have observed them evolving. If you don't do that, you can't account for antibiotic resistance, and diseases run rampant. It is only by rejecting the religious perspective that it's been possible to confront disease and to make it less powerful, to give us any tools, to compensate for these threats to human health.But I also want to point out the absurdity that Ross Douthat comes up with, saying that we ought to be concerned about offending the people who lived in the past, who believed in religion, by saying that we now don't believe in religion. That’s odd thing to worry about, don't you think?Should we really worry that it is offensive for non-believers, to argue that there is no God, that it offends people who lived in the past who are long dead? This objection from Ross Douthat here only makes sense if you believe that those people are somehow not dead, and they're still hanging around as ghosts, and that Jesus is going to come back, and he's going to make them rise up from the grave and go up to heaven.You know what? That is exactly what Ross Douthat believes. He believes that dead people are not really dead.I don't know what to say to that. I mean, death is death. Ross Douthat can't handle that.I understand why death is scary. I get why death is depressing sometimes. It really gets you down, that we all die, but it's real, and we see it every day on earth. We've never seen anyone rise from the grave. We've never seen anyone come back from the dead. It just doesn't happen.So, I think we should not be concerned about offending the religious dead with our non-belief. Dead people don't get offended. They don't have any feelings left. They're dead.On page 159, Ross Douthat performs another contortion in which he's saying that he got Lyme disease once, so he understands what it's like to be sick. He suggests that non-religious people don't understand illness, as if atheists haven't gotten sick and don't understand what sickness is about. Ross Douthat claims that people who get sick, and people who have financial struggles don’t understand how misfortune proves the existence of God.Ross Douthat has never had financial struggles in his entire life. He was born to a fortunate family. He went to Harvard University. Through his social connections, he got jobs that have given him loads of money.Ross Douthat is quite wealthy, but now he's saying that because he got Lyme disease, he can speak as a voice for people who don't have financial wherewithal, people who are financially struggling. That's really weird.Anyway, Ross Douthat is saying that that sick people and people who are financially struggling believe in religion more than the rest of the population. Douthat’s line of reasoning is that these people are suffering financially, and they're suffering with sickness, and they believe in God, the Christian God, so therefore, if that's good enough for them, what do the rest of us have any right to complain about? Therefore, it’s okay for God to torture people.The fact that somebody else is suffering and chooses not to confront the source of their suffering does not oblige the rest of us to go along with their religious submission to a cruel god. If someone else chooses not to think about where their suffering really comes from, and chooses not to skeptically examine the religion that takes advantage of them in their suffering, blaming them for their own pain, that’s their choice. The bizarre nature of their choice doesn’t teach us anything about the ultimate reality of the Cosmos. The weirdness of some people’s religious obsessions is not evidence that their beliefs are valid.We also should doubt the accuracy of Ross Douthat’s claim that people with illnesses and financial problems are more likely to believe in God than everybody else. Ross Douthat doesn't provide any citation of any source for this idea of his. He's just saying that, well, he got sick with Lyme disease, and so now he knows that people who are financially struggling and who are sick, tend to believe in the Christian God more than anybody else. The fact that Ross Douthat says it’s true doesn’t make it true.We should note, however, that this new argument from Ross Douthat contradicts what Douthat claimed back in chapter 3, when he said that religious people often get cured of their illnesses through the power of prayer and the intercession of Christian saints. If Douthat’s claim about faith healing is true, then religious people should be less likely to be seriously ill. Instead, Ross Douthat is claiming that religious people are more likely to be seriously ill than everyone else.Could it be that religiously devout people are more likely to be gravely ill than secular people because religious people are more likely to engage in fruitless attempts at faith healing instead of seeking scientifically valid medical treatment? I don’t know if that’s true or not, so I’m not going to pretend that I do, but it’s one possible explanation.So therefore, we shouldn't object to the idea that an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent God is not being consistent and is causing suffering in the world?It's a nonsensical argument, but what he's saying is, once again, if other people believe in something, then you should not object to it because to contradict their religion and their beliefs just seems mean. Ross Douthat is saying that disagreeing with religion should be avoided because it’s impolite to the feelings of dead people.That isn't a logical argument. It's not a rational argument. It's not reasonable. It's just Ross Douthat flailing for a justification of his religion.On this question of why God does wicked things and allows wicked things to happen, once again, Ross Douthat completely fails to provide any reasonable response.That's just one more reason, Ross Douthat, that not everyone believes.

Ross Douthat promised to build a rational argument in favor of religion, but in chapter 5 of his book he is telling readers that whenever they get a momentary feeling about a religion, it’s a magical omen coming straight from the creator of the entire universe, a supernatural message crafted specifically for them.Welcome back for another episode of Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that reads through a book that has the title Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.Imagine that, living in a world where nobody makes the decision to step away from religion and look at it from the outside. It seems like we would be missing something in that scenario. That's definitely the case with this book.The author is Ross Douthat. He is an ideologically extremist right wing Christian nationalist pundit on 60 Minutes, a TV show that used to be regarded as a serious journalistic endeavor, but has been taken over by Donald Trump and his supporters on the threat of losing the FCC licensure and a whole bunch of other punishments from the federal government.The United States federal government under Donald Trump as president, and Donald Trump personally, were threatening to persecute and prosecute CBS, because they didn't like what 60 Minutes had to say about Donald Trump through accurate reporting. They didn't like what 60 Minutes had to say about certain political truths, so they hounded CBS. They threatened the television network until CBS gave in, surrendered, and allowed a right wing ideologue, Barry Weiss, to come in and to appoint Ross Douthat as a member of the new team at 60 Minutes, which would be friendly to Donald Trump. It was a sad day when that happened.What we're dealing with right now, though, is this book, Believe which Ross Douthat had published in 2025 to coincide with the inauguration of Donald Trump's second term as president, as a Christian Nationalist, and telling everyone that they should just go along with it and believe in this religious ideology of extremism.We're now on page 146, and on that page, we have Ross Douthat, telling us once again that when you're choosing a religion, you shouldn't choose a smaller religion. As he says, “You don't have to pull every text off the shelves of a bookstore of all religions. The big books will do for a start.”Ross Douthat never gets beyond that start. He argues that the bigger an idea is, the more popular it is, the more likely it is to be true. According to him, that's a sign that Christianity is true, because it's the most popular religion ever. Yeah, the most popular is necessarily true.What we're going to see moving forward in this chapter is that Ross Douthat is always referring to major religions. Major religions are of a certain variety because they are associated with social power. Major religions are tools of social control. They are, therefore, elitist kinds of ideological tools. They are not from the outside. Christianity in our society is in control of the U.S. Federal government, and has the support of 60% of the population. If you are looking for an elite in the United States of America, look for a Christian.Certainly, if you want to be in Donald Trump's cabinet, that's what you've got to be. Donald Trump's cabinet is supporting Christianity directly, even though we're supposed to have a First Amendment, under which we're not supposed to have the government promoting religion in general or any religion specifically. Nonetheless, Christianity has got the full endorsement of the U.S. Federal government and kids are being coerced, families are being coerced to join back into Christian churches.That's the context of why we're reading through this book. It's not just out of idle intellectual curiosity or a persnicketiness about the truth. It's because Christianity right now is the dominant ideology of power.Christianity is not just a bunch of ideas. It is a propaganda machine. It is a tool to get people to obey, to conform, to join in and do what seems to be popular.Today we're going to go on to page 147, where Ross Douthat is making a claim here that seems kind of wild to me.He's saying that when it comes to choosing a religion, you just ought to let things leap out at you, to kind of strike you as ideas, and if they do, that's a sign from God.Once again, Ross Douthat is rejecting rationality. He's rejecting logic. His argument in this paragraph at the top of page 147 is that if an idea or a religious sect or a religious leader grabs your attention, then it's probably a supernatural magical message from God.Here's the text as he wrote it:“If you've never experienced belief before, if you feel yourself to have a completely open mind and suddenly a specific text or figure leaps out at you, a story speaks to you like nothing else, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you very seriously. At the very least, it's a strong signal that this is where you're supposed to start.”This whole idea that your life has something that is supposed to happen, and that when happens, it's because it's part of a plan, that you're living within a story that was written by a magical creature, is running throughout Ross Douthat's book. It's an idea that has absolutely no evidence to back it up.This is classic wish fulfillment. It isn't rationality. It's a kind of irrationality. It's a kind of delusion.Ross Douthat is supporting this idea in order to say that if you're religious, you should just follow wherever your attention happens to lead, and if you happen to hear a message that's Christian, for example, well then that's a signal from God that you're supposed to be a Christian. Of course, in the United States where the majority of the population, 60%, not a big majority, a shrinking majority, but it's still a majority of the population is Christian, and Christian churches are everywhere, and Christian churches are allowed to go without paying any taxes, and Christian is the ideology that is in charge of our fascist government, guess what message you're going to hear: Christianity.Ross Douthat knows you're going to hear this message, and he's telling you that whenever you hear about Christianity, it's an omen. It's an omen. It's a message from God, from the universe speaking just to you. It’s been arranged by the ruler of the universe for you to hear that radio show, to pick up that book, to see that billboard that promotes Christianity. It wasn't an accident. There was magic involved getting your brain to pay attention to that.In this claim, Ross Douthat is going back way, way back before the development of logic, before the development of reason and rationality. Before the development of science. He's going way back to this magical thinking where whatever happens is supposed to happen, so you should just kind of let things happen to you and presume that they're good, that everything is a good idea whenever you hear a message.Just believe. This is the message that is underneath this book, the idea that you should just be gullible. You should just believe, believe, believe, whenever you hear a message. Believe, when you hear that message from authority, especially.You should just believe. Don't think. Don't doubt. Don't have skeptical inquiry. Don't examine ideas. Just go along with it.This is the ideology of fascism, of religious totalitarianism, which, of course, Ross Douthat is a servant of. That why he's at 60 Minutes.That, Ross Douthat, is why not everyone believes.I'm not going to pretend that there are no people in the United States of America who are willing to go along with Ross Douthat's proposal that you should just be gullible and just believe whatever people in power tell you, just go along with a dominant ideology and don't think about it too hard, don't worry your little head about anything. No, in fact, we know that quite a large number of Americans are willing to go along with that sort of thing.Still, not everyone believes. Not everyone believes. Half of the American population, when they're willing to work at it, when they're willing to think real hard, they understand that you can't just take the the word of your political leaders, of religious organizations, of religious ideologies for granted.You can't just go along with whatever the priest tells you to do, because you know that the priests have often told you to just give them all your money. Give away all control over your own personal life. Maybe they've told you to do rather unscrupulous sexual things, or maybe they've told you to go on and abuse others in the name of their God.Throughout chapter five, Ross Douthat is of making a real scatter brained argument about what kind of religion you should have. He's pretending to be open-minded, even though we know that at the end he's going to be arguing that you actually should go with Christianity and everything else is wrong.We know that his Roman Catholic religion in particular teaches that Roman Catholics are right and everyone else is wrong, and you should not belong to any other religion, and that's it, period. Catholics teach that they’re right, they have the Truth.In this chapter, where Ross Douthat is saying, well, if you like this idea, you should just go along with, maybe try out this religious path, or if you like another idea, well, if you like that, then you should try another religious path, and maybe you should just try a whole bunch of different things, and, you know, commit to something that feels right to you, sort of, you know, as in this paragraph, if a book or a TV show happens to pop up, well, then you should take that sign from God that that's what you should do. It's really kind of loosey-goosey. It's not consistent with the standard he promotes in the rest of the book.Ross Douthat can't keep an idea straight in his head. He claims that there is an absolute Truth, a master designer, the supernatural, magical being or fantastical. He claims that this designer of the universe has set things up, everything up so that you will find the one true religion, and now he's saying, you should just follow your nose. Do whatever.The choices Ross Douthat is making in the language as he writes this book are not loose and free and accidental. In chapter 5, you will find that Ross Douthat is referring consistently to any idea of a transcendent reality or a divinity or any kind of religious path in any sense as “God”. He's using that name for it, and I want you to keep in mind that that is a Christian name for the Christian divinity, for the Christian magical supernatural creature that is supposed to have created and controlled the universe.“God” is not a neutral term. Again and again, even in this chapter where Ross Douthat is pretending to consider that there might be possibilities other than Christianity for some religious people, Douthat is making the Christian god the default the natural destination for all religious paths.Ross Douthat chose the title for this book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. What he really means is that everyone should be Christian. Ross Douthat is trying to tell everyone to conform not just to religion in general, but to his particular religion.In a time when that religion is very closely linked to brutal, violent, anti-democratic fascism, we all should be suspicious of that command to conform. That's why not everyone believes Ross Douthat.

We are on page 140 out of just a little bit over 200 pages in Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It's a small book.Ross Douthat couldn't really summon much in the way of ideas for this book, which is surprising, because Christianity, which is what this book is really arguing for, has a history of a couple thousand years. This is the best that Ross Douthat could come up with?Anyway, we are on page 140 of his book. This podcast, Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat, covers a detailed examination of Douthat’s arguments in favor of religion broadly, and Christianity specifically.On this page, Ross Douthat is warning against the dangers of nature, and against the world, and how how awful nature is, and how you must not belong to a religion that worships nature, because nature is bad, bad, bad. Ross Douthat seems to thinks that nature is demonic.Ross Douthat’s own words on this are as follows:“The peril of polytheism is linked to the source of its appeal by positing supernatural forces that are linked to the natural world rather than fully outside or above it, delivers a kind of intimacy, but also an inherent danger, because one thing that's clear about physical nature is that it's extremely perilous, filled with predators and traps, things that will kill you, without thinking twice in places to get near permanently lost, which is why the darkest forms of polytheism can get very dark indeed, treating the book of nature as a moral template, and worshiping gods of strength and cruelty, as in Aztec, human sacrifice and bloody Viking conquest. If you go looking for the face of God entirely in imminent forms and secondary powers, there's always a danger that you'll end up worshiping a demon.”This, of course, is what Ross Douthat’s religion teaches him. It teaches him that every potential spirit or god that does not belong to Christianity, that is not the Christian God itself, all of those are just demons that are dangerous and evil and wicked and bad.Ross Douthat conveniently forgets who invented those demons, and for that matter, who invented the natural world, full of peril and bad things that will kill you, and do mean things to you, in which you can get lost. That would be God, the Christian God. Christians believe that their god made all these supposedly terrible things.Now, of course, that's not true. There is no God, certainly not as proposed in Christianity.There is no evidence that any supernatural being created this world. There is no evidence that demons exist, but Ross Douthat believes in the literal reality of demons. He has made it clear already that if you deviate from the true path of religion, you will be set upon by demons. Demons will appear, and they will control you and do wicked, terrible things to you.Of course, according to his own religion, those demons were created by the Christian God. Ross Douthat forgets that part.Here's the other thing that Ross Douthat doesn't deal with in this paragraph that I just read to you. He has described the physical nature of the universe as extremely perilous. However, earlier in this book, Douthat wrote that it's remarkable how the universe seems to be attuned to life, and claimed that's evidence that God must exist, that there must be a designer who made it that way.Once again, we see that Ross Douthatis not capable of holding any thought in his mind consistently for very long at all. That makes him incapable of maintaining a rational argument that lasts for very long.One thing I haven't done in this podcast is to identify and explain the structure of what rational thought is, of what logic is and how it works. Pre-Christian philosophers developed these rules of logic and they really aren't very very difficult to understand.Here is one basic principle of logic: You cannot say that something is both true and untrue. You cannot say that Proposition X is true and then say that Proposition X is not true. If you do that kind of thing, your argument is illogical. Irrational, not reasonable.That’s a basic rule of logic. It’s a fundamental of reasoned thinking.It's not very complex, but Ross Douthat, on page 140, is saying that the world, the physical world that we live in, is perilous and it's terrifying. It's awful, even though earlier, he said that the world is welcoming to life in remarkable ways.So he's saying that Proposition X is both true and untrue, Proposition X being that the world is a lovely place, so wonderful, that only a divinely all-powerful and all good god could have made it. It must have been a designer.Here's another basic rule of logic: Disproving one proposition, one idea does not mean that another idea is necessarily true.In logic, they often give an idea the label of a letter, just so that you can keep it straight, so that you can see clearly the structures of an argument.So here on page 140, we have a couple of different propositions. One is that the physical world and any spirits that might represent that world are dangerous.We'll call that first claim Proposition A.There is another proposition in this paragraph, which I'll call proposition Q. Proposition Q is that a spirit, a god that is outside of nature is not dangerous, is not perilous.Those are 2 propositions, and in logic, just because you disprove proposition A, it doesn't mean that proposition Q is true. It just means proposition A is false.Do you get that? That's basic logic. Ross Douthat doesn't understand that basic foundational rule in logic.Think about it in terms of a grocery store. If proposition A = I'm going to buy a watermelon, and proposition Q =I'm going to buy macaroni and cheese, if you go into a grocery store with the object of buying just one piece of food, and you conclude through some process that you’re not buying proposition A, the watermelon, does that mean necessarily that you're going to buy the macaroni and cheese?No, it doesn't. You could buy a chocolate bar. You could buy a can of soup. You could buy ice cream, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are a huge number of possibilities out there.Also, it may well be that both the macaroni and cheese and the melon are wrong for you. It could be both of them are tainted with some kind of poison. Just because the watermelon is poisonous doesn't mean that the macaroni and cheese has not been tainted with poison also.Do you understand that?At the same time, we have this idea that just because (if we accept Ross Douthat's proposition) that any spirit and any religion that is rooted in nature is evil and demonic, that doesn't mean that a monotheistic religion with a supposedly transcendent god is not wicked and dangerous as well.Both could be true.You see, how logic and reason and rationality are just not part of Ross Douthat’s skill set here?Of course, the most plausible proposition of them all is that really, none of these supernatural things exist, because Ross Douthat hasn't provided any solid evidence that any of these things are true at all.So, we could have a transcendent god that belongs to a realm outside of the physical world as we know it, a realm that is perilous and dangerous and full of wickedness. The god that lives there could be the worst thing ever. In fact, if that god designed this world full of peril, you would expect the god to be cruelWould you go into a grocery store where you found out that the lettuce is tainted with deadly bacteria and then go and buy the spinach that's been on the shelf right next to that lettuce? That would be risky. You might start to think the green grocer is just not reliable. Ross Douthat considers none of these things.In this paragraph from chapter five, there's something really simple and basic, that he doesn't explore. Ross Douthat doesn't prove it. He doesn't provide any evidence that there is an inherent link between nature-based religions or polytheism, and dangerous kinds of religious practices or spirits.He provides a couple of examples of things that he doesn't like: Pagan Vikings and Aztec human sacrifice. We know, however, that the same god of Christianity that Ross Douthat worships, demanded that his prophet Abraham conduct a human sacrifice, that Abraham climb a mountain with his son, and then tie his son up and slit his throat and burn his body as an offering to the God of the Bible.Human sacrifice seems to have been a big part of it of the cult of God.That same God, as a part of the religious worship of him, has demanded that people go out and slaughter children and babies, to commit genocide.As a character, the Christian god is bad news And aren't we lucky that that Christian god appears not to be real? Oh yes, we are.If you want to involve us in a church that worships a violent, vengeful kind of god that asks his followers to conduct human sacrifice of their own children, upon his own whim, well, that's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.

We're getting to the part of the book now where Ross Douthat is repeating himself. It kind of looks like, the way that this book reads, Douthat really struggled to find a lot of things to say, to fill up a book.In this new chapter, chapter five, called Big Faiths and Big Divisions, but so far Ross Douthat is just repeating what he’s already said in this chapter. I’ve reading through seven pages of this chapter to get to this point where we're going to be today. It's the same old idea that he's written about before: You should go along like a lemming with everybody else. You should believe in religion because that's what most people are doing. You should believe in a religion, specifically that the most people believe in, because large numbers of people are always right.Oh, the wisdom of crowds. You know what happened with the wisdom of crowds this last week? There were these prediction markets where you can gamble on public events, such as the election of the leader of Brazil, and the prediction markets were all saying that Bolsonaro, the right wing Christian nationalist would.. Win the election, become the new leader of Brazil, and Silva, the more progressive, not quite so Christian nationalist, candidate would lose. Those prediction markets were profoundly wrong.Stock market crashes are another example of this idea, where often crowds are wrong. Remember NFTs? Those were blockchain enabled graphics or other forms of media that had hidden within them these kind of crypto ledgers and nobody could ever really figure out what they were about, but there was a bunch of hype and so people just rushed in to buy them. Matt Damon was out there promoting them, saying, boy, you are going to miss the boat if you don't go along with this trend. Then, they all ended up being worth practically nothing, selling for fractions of a penny each, when they had been selling for thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars on the market before.It was all a deception. There were people who owned a lot of these things and they were doing self trading to make it look like there was a demand for these things when there really wasn’t. A lot of people went along with it, and a lot of people were wrong.George W. Bush’s rush to invade and occupy Iraq is another example of the stupidity of crowds. The majority of Americans believed Bush’s lies. They believed that Saddam Hussein had terrible weapons of mass destruction that made it necessary to for the USA to go to war. They were wrong. There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The crowds were not wise. The crowds were bloody idiots.Ross Douthat seems to be overlooking the fact sometimes the majority of people are just plain wrong.So, on page 131 of Ross Douthat’s book, he has been, for several pages, making this same argument all over again. It makes me feel like he's just trying to puff up the page count in this book so that it doesn't come off as what it really is, which is just a pamphlet without very many thoughts behind it.On page 131, Ross Douthat has come up with a particular argument that I want to examine because it relates to Christian doctrine in particular.The first paragraph reads:“It’s a reasonable bet that the big, resilient, long enduring faith traditions, Christianity, and Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, are more likely to stand in a strong relationship, to the truth about existence, than religions that flared and died, that subsist in cultural isolation, or that came into existence the day before yesterday.”Ross Douthat seems to think that he's being clever, trying to have a kind of survival-of-the-fittest argument, but not with biological species. It's with religions instead.Actually, the more up to date versions of the models of biological evolution through natural selection can indicate to you is that some species, or even some ideas can, survive for a long while, and then they can go extinct, because conditions change. Conditions are not permanent.There's not one eternal truth, one strength, that everything is trying to be closer to. Biological evolution is not the story of a bunch of life forms trying to become human, with humans obviously being the best and everything else out there being a failed version of humanity, in which a jellyfish doesn't do very well at being human, but monkeys do better.You can have species that have very small numbers, but they're very well adapted to small, niche environments. On the other hand, you can have adaptations come along that would have been great in another situation, but because they came up in a situation that was badly suited for those adaptations the animals that carry those adaptations don't survive. The species goes extinct.It’s not that the animal was bad. It's not that the animal is wrong. It just had a mutation in the wrong circumstances.That’s where Ross Douthat just can't match the sophistication of the idea of biological evolution through natural selection. Ross Douthat is caught up in the childish idea that there is Truth and that everything is in the universe is just either true or false is either in accord with that Truth and with God, or it's not.Douthat argues in this chapter that  maybe you can have different distinctions of Truth according to that one absolute standard of God, but God is what Truth is, and everything is either more true or less true than the Truth that God defines, more or less true than Christianity.That's not how adaptation through natural selection works, though, so this idea Ross Douthat has come up with of religions competing against each other in a competitive marketplace, with the survivors being closer to the truth, it really doesn't hold water.For example, there could be a religion like, oh, I don't know, let's say Christianity. This religion has small numbers for a long time and is really struggling to gain adherents Then it's picked up opportunistically as a tool by the Roman Empire. The emperor decides to use this religion to gain power and to control people. Thus, Christianity gets the military power of the Roman Empire. The violence of the empire spreads that religion, not because it has truth merit, but because the Romans are slaughtering anybody who doesn't agree with that religion.When soldiers go and kill all of the members of another religion, does that show that a religion is more true? According to Ross Douthat's argument, it does.This idea of the wisdom of crowds doesn't even hold water within Christianity. In Christianity, starting in Judaism, but then going forward into Christianity, you have all of these stories about how people actually tend to make the wrong decision.You can find this religious idea of the stupidity of large numbers of people in the idea that people are naturally sinners and naturally mistaken. They just keep on making the wrong decisions.The Christian belief is that human intuition just can’t be trusted. There's thestory of what happened in the book of Genesis when God was a genocidal killer and he killed off all of the people because he made them, but then they all ended up doing the wrong thing. All of humanity was thoroughly wrong about pretty much everything, according to the Bible.If we were to follow the logic of Ross Douthat, we would say that whatever all those people were doing, because most of them were doing, it must have been right. Whatever the most people do is closer to the truth.This genocidal story from the book of Genesis, the story of God sending this flood to kill almost all people on Earth, clearly shows that this idea of Ross Douthat’s doesn’t work, even within Christian faith.It's not just the book of Genesis, of course. We can also go to the story of Moses. Moses got those 10 commandments, right? God gave Moses a whole bunch of tablets with a bunch of laws that everyone was supposed to follow.You know what happened next. The Jews who were wandering through the desert, trying to get back to their promised land, started worshiping other gods, the Golden Calf and that sort of thing.This comes up all the time, over and over again in the Old Testament. Moses had to get angry and kill a bunch of his followers for believing the wrong thing, just to get the others back in line.Once again we have the idea of killing people for not believing the same thing that you do. That's a trend in Christianity, isn't it?That trend, of course, continues in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation. I hate to break it to all of you Christians out there that think you're going to be raptured up, but the New Testament seems to say that only 144,000 Christians are the true believers. It's a relatively small number, and they're the only ones who are going to get saved from being tortured by God, killed by God, then raised from the dead to be tortured again by God.So once again, you have this idea in Christianity, the Christian text itself in the New Testament, that the true faith is harbored by a small number of people, not by a large number of them.Ross Douthat is trying to do something that makes him feel like he's being a little bit more liberal, which is to say, okay, okay, yes, there is one really True religion, and that's my religion. That's Roman Catholicism. Yes, that is the True, truest of True religions, but maybe there can be other ones that have little elements of truth, and maybe they're damning themselves to hell, and eternal destruction and torture and punishment for having something's wrong, but hey, the other religions are not completely wrong, so that's better than being an atheist, at least.Once again, Ross Douthat is ignoring what Christian doctrine and the Bible actually says. When we go back to those commandments of Moses, one of the favorites that is included by Christians in what they like to call the Ten Commandments. Is this one: “Thou shall have no other god but me.” You shall not follow any other god but me. There's only one, and everything else is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.So what's the lesson of chapter five so far from Ross Douthat’s book? It's that Ross Douthat can't even maintain the doctrines of his own religion, and those doctrines just don't match external reality.That is why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.

Demons are no more real than the Christian god is. Nonetheless, Ross Douthat has summoned demons to do his dirty work.Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.I said at the beginning of this podcast, in the first episode, that we were going to be going page by page, line by line, and okay, I'm not examining every word of Ross Douthat’s book, but boy, he just packs in a whole lot of nonsense very densely.If you're just hearing this podcast for the 1st time, let you know what book it is that we're talking about. We're talking about a book by Ross Douthat, who is formerly from the New York Times, as an opinion writer. He's really just a professional pundit. He's now with 60 Minutes, which is controlled by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Now 60 Minutes has become an ideological kind of rag on the television.Ross Douthat is the author of the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. We are now in the 4th chapter and we're at the bottom of the page, 119.Today's episode is going to be brief because I'm just talking about one paragraph. This one paragraph shows how nonsensical. Ross Douthat’s whole perspective is and what it's really all about. It reads like this:“For some, a small but meaningful minority, welcome is the straightforward answer, and if you're setting out to discover Satanism, then you probably aren't going to be talked into joining a more mainstream faith without some hard experience first, but other spiritually mind open-minded people experience a chronic uncertainty about how to handle negative encounters, and the mere appearance of the dark or negative or devilish, no less than the appearance of a ghost or monster in the horror movie isn't by itself enough to convince them, not to keep opening doors and looking into basements and wandering down corridors that might be better left unexplored.”This paragraph at 1st appears just to be about monsters and demons, devils, dark things, negative things, going places, they're not supposed to go, thinking things are not supposed to think doing things that are against the rules of God.We all know that monsters don't exist. Devils, demons, ghosts, they don't actually exist. There's no evidence for them.If at this point, you don't get that. I really don't know what to do with you because there's no photographs, there's no, you know, genetic samples from them, no videos, and we have so much research equipment that's all around the world right now, that if there were ghosts and demons and monsters showing up, We would see them. We would see them. They're not there.Why is Ross Douthat talking about these imaginary magical creatures? Yes, it is ridiculous and irrational for him to believe in these things. Nonetheless, they are doing work for him. Ross Douthat’s writing in this paragraph shows us what that work is.First of all, when it comes to Satanism, Ross Douthat doesn't even bother to engage with what Satanism actually is. Satanists don't believe in gods. They don't believe in the literal reality of Satan. They believe in actually kind of a more atheist approach.Satanists use Satan as a symbolic character to represent independent thinking and rebellion against tyranny, against authoritarianism that is represented by the Christian God. The Christian god is a tyrant, an authoritarian. The Christian god set up a world that's full of death, that's full of misery and suffering.Of course, no, God hasn't really done these things, because God doesn't exist. We're talking about God as a character.God is a symbol of kingship. That's why Christians love calling their god the “King of Kings, the Lord of Lords”. The Christian god is a monarch. It’s an authoritarian tyrant that Christians are worshiping.Ross Douthat says that you need to worry about demons because they're negative. Negative sounds so, you know, bad. It sounds so wrong.But hey, wait a minute. You know what negative really is? Negative is the right to say no. Negative is the right to set boundaries that other people are not allowed to cross, when it comes to your own life.Being negative enables you to say no, you're not allowed to touch me in that way., no, you're not allowed to take my things, no, you're not allowed to come into my house in the middle of the night and bother me, no, you don’t have the right to tell me who to love and how to live my life.The thing with Christians like Ross Douthat Is that they're terrified by other people saying no to them. They are terrified by other people rejecting the beliefs that they believe everyone must have, as Ross Douthat said earlier in this book when he talked about the obligation of religious belief.Ross Douthat believes that obeying the kingship of his god, the cosmic dictator, is the only way that you can save yourself from being tortured by that same god. That's what the Book of Revelation is all about. That kind of punishment after death was not there in Judaism. That's something that was invented by the followers of Jesus. Christianity invented the threat of Hell and divine torture. They invented a sacred cult of pain as a manifestation of their worship of tyranny, of the power of one monarch.Christianity is the worship of monotheism. Monotheism is mythological monarchy, mythological dictatorship, authoritarianism with magical beings.With that, along come those devilish characters. What do the devils and the demons represent? In Christian cosmology, they represent angels who said no to God.They said, no, we don't like what you're doing, and we're going to make our own choices. To punish them God, tried to kill them all, and tortured them and imprisoned them. We're supposed to be afraid of the demons, but all this while, God is still threatening us with torture if we don't obey.Again, remember this isn't really happening. There are no gods. There are no demons, there are no devils. So, what is the actual project?The actual project is an ideological system that supports totalitarian dictatorships that supports tyrannical kings, queens, monarchs, the idea that power should be concentrated in the hand of one person.The role of everybody else is not to question is simply to obey. Look at what is happening in the United States of America right now. It’s a Christian restoration of ugly, ruthless authoritarianism.It's not for nothing that Ross Douthat fails to even try to engage with the idea of Satanism as it actually is, as a metaphorical kind of social movement.Satanists don't believe that Satan is real or gods are real. What they believe in is the value of independent thinkers.All that Ross Douthat says about Satanism is this:“If you're setting out to discover Satanism, then you probably aren't going to be talked into joining a more mainstream faith.”It’s telling that Ross Douthat only supports mainstream faith. Conformity is what his Christianity is all about. It's all about getting everybody to do the same thing, the thing that human priests and human dictators want you to do, what they tell you to do. Conform. Obey.He's simply deciding that Satanists aren't going to be convinced.Well, has he even tried to reason with Satanists? Has he even tried to actually talk with them?Ross Douthat doesn't want to construct any rational arguments against Satanism because in order to do that, he would have to publicly acknowledge what Satanism really is, not what the Catholic Church says, it is.If Ross Douthat were to do that, he would have to acknowledge that Satanists are rebelling against tyranny, that they're standing up for freedom, the freedom of people to think as they want to, to act as they want to, without cruelty. They're standing against the concentration of power in the hands of a few.Ross Douthat doesn't even engage in a rational discussion with that idea. Once again, he's betraying the promise that he made at the beginning of the book.Ross Douthat is not being an honest writer. He is not being an honest thinker. He's simply using scare tactics.He's comparing independent thinkers, skeptics, atheists, and nonconformists to monsters. He is saying that they are actually in league with real monsters that literally exist.Ross Douthat is doing that in order to scare you, to intimidate you, so that you stop thinking for yourself. It's a really cheap trick.That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat writes about why you ought to belong to not just a religion, but to a church. Religious belief in itself really isn't the goal for Ross Douthat. Belief is part of what he'd like you to do, but really what's much more important is that he wants you to belong to a religious organization. Organized religion, he says, has benefits. We’ll get to one of those.On page 118, Ross Douthat is trying to do away with an objection to what he's talking about. He is dismissing one of the most frequent criticisms of organized religion.Even for those people who believe in magic and the supernatural and gods, spirits, you know, fairies, stuff like that. They will point out that organized religion is pretty vapid. It's pretty empty. It's filled with a lot of people who really can't be trusted, um, who who don't do what they preach, all of that morality that Ross Douthat was talking about. A lot of people in organized religion end up doing a lot of immoral stuff.On page 118, Ross Douthat is arguing against that. He is acknowledging, “Certainly, in a society where professed faith is a default, and almost everyone is participating in a religious tradition, there is a grave temptation toward hypocrisy, fake piety, the kinds of empty spiritual practice that the world's great religions warn against, almost as often as they warn against active impiety, or unbelief, and there are certainly communities in our own society where this socially conditioned pretense of religion still exists, but in most regions of contemporary culture, and certainly for most people hesitating on the threshold of religion, the dangers of hypocrisy and fake piety are relatively distant ones, while the dangers inherent in spiritual individualism are more immediate and pressing. If your reason for avoiding institutional religion is the fear of the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials or even just the stifling atmosphere of some pre Vatican II Catholic parishes or Protestant small towns, you are letting a danger that's increasingly remote push you away from the things that are necessary to mitigating today's perils, today’s problems, isolation rather than Pharisaism, narcissism, rather than authoritarianism, a world that leaves you alone in despair, rather than a society that's always nosing in your business.”Ross Douthat is saying that if you're worried about religious authoritarianism, well, that's just a distant concern. That's not a big deal.What you need to worry about is people doing what they want and just being individuals. That's the real threat.I’ve got to ask you something: If you take a look at what's happening in the United States of America, do you really think freedom and individualism is wrecking this country?We're about to have an election, a midterm election. Donald Trump is not on the ballot because it's not a presidential election year, but it is a de facto kind of test of his popularity, because a whole bunch of Republican members of Congress who have been giving Donald Trump pretty much everything that he wants, letting him do whatever he wants, not holding him to account.They're up for election now, and in republican majority districts as well as democratic majority of districts, those Republican candidates are profoundly unpopular. This is one of the most stark anti-Republican voting moods in the electorate in a long time. In about a week and a half, I guess about a week, it's happening soon. We're going to see exactly how far that rejection of Donald Trump is going.I just did early voting today, and if you live in a Democratic majority area where you can trust the Board of Election not to do shenanigans on behalf of Donald Trump, I encourage you to do early voting. Get it out of the way, make sure that it's not difficult for you to do voting. That's what early voting was set up to do to empower people, to empower democracy and the freedoms that it protects, which is why Donald Trump hates it so much.Donald Trump also hates Donald Trump hates when people reject Christianity. He is so into Christianity and he talks about it all the time. You know Donald Trump was raised in a Christian church.A lot of people say that Donald Trump has never set foot in a Christian church in his life. That's not true. The church that he went to when he was a young lad, and the one where he got his religious confirmation, there are photographs of him in that church.You know what that church did? It forbade, it outlawed, it banned African-American couples from being members of the church. That church taught hatred. That church taught Donald Trump that religion and discrimination and oppression go hand in hand and you should use religion as a tool of oppression, of discrimination, of inflicting suffering on your enemies. That's the kind of Christianity that Donald Trump was raised on, and that's exactly what he's doing today.We have a Christian Nationalist government that is taking food away from hungry people, not just here in the United States, but around the world. We have a country that is waging war, is encouraging war, that is threatening Greenland, is threatening Canada. We're bombing schools.We're driving prices up. Donald Trump recently said, well, the oil companies are making a great profit on the oil, so what if the American people have to pay a little bit extra? That is the voice of Christian Nationalism.Donald Trump is the same guy who's saying, yes, we're a Christian nation now.He said that If I'm elected, you're going to have Christian visibility, this is going to be about showing what Christian Americans are really all about. Trump had the support of the majority of Christian voters in America, and you know what, he still does.There's a Pew Research poll that shows that only one third of Christian Americans are planning to vote against Donald Trump's Christian nationalist fascist agenda.We have people being shot dead in the streets by secret police. We have electronic surveillance all across the country being set up under a Christian nationalist authoritarian regime. We have concentration camps in which people are dying, in which people are being disappeared, children being separated from their parents. People are being shipped off to countries they've never been to, where people speak languages that they don't know, where there are yet more concentration camps.This is being done in the name of Jesus, in the name of God, and yet, Ross Douthat is saying that there's not any big risk of any kind of religious hypocrisy, no religious danger. No religious authoritarianism. It's not a risk. He's saying it's just not happening.Take a look at what's happening with digital fascism, the way that you're being watched all the time, not just with those flock surveillance cameras, but through your phone, through your activities on the web, through everything that you buy, every kind of electronic communication that you have. It's being swept up by the government and by corporations.This is all being done to create a religious authoritarian state. At the same time, Ross Douthat is saying here on page 118 of his book, Believe, that the real risk is that you're free to be an individual who makes your own decisions about what you believe and what you don't. That, to me, is absolutely shocking.There's something that Ross Douthat said at the end of this, that what the real danger is, what today's perils are really all about. Over on the next page, we have a new section of this 4th chapter. This new section is called Not Every Door Should Be Opened.What is it about? You know what it's about?It's about demons.Yeah, we have Donald Trump wrecking, threatening to take away your right even to vote in the United States, absolutely ruining American democracy and replacing it with a corrupt kind of authoritarianism that is defined by Christianity.Now Ross Douthat says that's not the big deal. What you need to worry about, says Ross Douthat, is demons.I'm going to read to you a little bit of what Ross Douthat has to say about the demonic threat in his own words.“Institutions offer spiritual protections that aren't available on your own. If the supernatural is potentially real, it is also potentially dangerous with more substantial stakes than most interactions in the natural and the everyday. Part of the point of the evolved technology of organized religion is to provide safety and security to travelers in this landscape to connect a secret to cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race, to help discern the difference between experiences worth pursuing and roads best left untaken, and to provide direct protection against the forces and experiences that seem destructive and demonic. ‘Don't mess around with demons’ might seem like too basic a message to require the structure of an entire religion to convey and reinforce, but in fact, what happens in horror movies, the people who go into that room or open that book or hold that seance, with predictably disastrous consequences, also happens in real life.”Ross Douthat is saying not to worry about the technologies of Christian Nationalist authoritarian fascism to spy on your life, to send out fake messages and propaganda, to manipulate you, to control you. Don't worry about the way that Bitcoin is being used for public officials like the President of the United States to take massive bribes, so that only rich people get what they need and everyone else has to do without.You know what that's about. The rising prices don’t come from nowhere. Inflation comes from Christian nationalist fascism and the political corruption that undergirds that and undermines our democracy.No, no, Ross Douthat is saying, don't worry about that, because what's important is that the Catholic Church has technologies, religious technologies, to protect you from demons. Do you know what religious technologies he's talking about? He's talking about exorcisms and sprinkling holy water on you.Ross Douthat is saying, you need to belong to a church so that you can have guys in funny costumes mutter Latin phrases that are magic somehow, and sprinkle holy water on you, to protect you from demons, because demons and evil spirits are what you need to be worried about.Ross Douthat is saying that all the scary monsters in horror movies are real, but fascism is not real.Ross Douthat is saying also that if you are a Christian, but you don't belong to a church, and the right church, the kind that practices exorcisms, like the Catholic church, well then, you don't get any protection.When he's talking about friendly cosmic powers, Ross Douthat said that the role of Christian churches is to introduce you to, “cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race.”Who is he talking about? Who are the cosmic powers that are friendly to the human race? Is he talking about the Christian character that they call God, Jehovah, Yahweh? Is that the guy who is friendly to the human race?Do I have to remind you what the Christian Bible says that God did to people in the past? Of course, there's the Book of Job, in which God thought it would be fun, just to prove a point, to torture a man for years and years and kill his family and make him absolutely miserable. That was fun for God.Earlier, God encouraged genocide of entire cities of people just because they didn't worship him. God didn’t just provoke nasty battles in which a lot of soldiers got killed. God encouraged his followers to go and kill babies.Are you pro-life? How can a person say they're pro-life and be pro-Bible? I wonder about that.In the book of Genesis, where God decided, even though he made people, he didn't like them very much. God decided, “I’m going to kill them. I'm going to kill them all. I'm going to keep just one family together, and they're going to interbreed with each other and commit acts of incest to repopulate the earth, but I'm going to kill, kill, kill, kill. I'm going to drown everybody.”This is the character that is supposed to be a “cosmic power that's friendly to the human race.”Then we go to the New Testament. It’s not accurate to say that the Old Testament was brutal, but Jesus was all about bringing peace and love and changed everything to make it nice. That's not how it ended up, because actually, in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly threatens genocide against anyone who refuses to worship him. He says to entire cities of people that they’re going to wish that they had worshiped him and not turned him away and not refused to worship him as a god king, because Jesus is going to commit acts that are worse than what was done against Tyre and Sidon. Tyre and Sidon were two cities that were destroyed in genocides.In these passages, Jesus is saying, effectively, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you all if you don't worship me, and it's going to be worse than those genocides in Tyre and Sidon.People say that Jesus told all these lovely parables. Do you know the parable that he told about the king who rightfully ordered people to be brought in front of him and to be executed? Jesus said, I'm gonna be like that king.Elsewhere, in the gospels, Jesus said, don't think I've come here to bring peace. I have come to bring a sword and divide people. Jesus came with a sword, and he said that, if you don't hate your own children in order to love me better, you're not a follower of me. Jesus actually preached hate.Then there is the Book of Revelation. The Christian churches included Revelation in the Bible because it threatened bloody annihilation to everyone who is not a Christian. That part of the Bible threatens massive death and destruction with the approval of God, so that God will kill almost everybody on earth. Jesus announces that he will kill people in really nasty ways, torturing them first, and then bring them back from the dead, and then torture them more, just because they're not Christian.Ross Douthat says that Christian churches are there for introducing you to that guy, that killer? Why? Because you need protection from demons.It says in the Book of Revelation that it's God who's bringing on the monsters. God is bringing on the monsters.Ross Douthat is talking about demons. He's saying that these monsters are real, but there's no evidence that demons actually exist. There's no evidence that angels exist. There's no evidence that gods exist. No evidence. None. Not a single bit.There's nothing more a bunch of stories that Christians like to tell about this supernatural stuff. They’re the same kind of stories that people used to tell about Medusa and the cyclops and minotaurs and centaurs and griffins. People used to love to tell those stories, and some people believed that they were true. We now know that they are not true. In the same way, demons are not real.Let's speak from a perspective of reality for a second here. If God is such a nasty person who is constantly torturing and killing people, and blaming them for what he's done, never taking responsibility, making people suffer pain because of God's own mistakes, if that's real, and you think that that's real, why do you think that demons are the real problem?Maybe demons aren’t the biggest you have to deal with.I want Ross Douthat to address this point, because he said he's going to be reasonable. He promised to be logical and said he was going to be writing based on the facts that we can gather from our own senses.What are the facts that prove that demons are dangerous and evil and to be avoided? What is the evidence?I'll tell you. Ross Douthat provides zero evidence that demons are dangerous and evil.We are at page 119 of his book, out of what is barely more than 200 pages. There are just 206 pages of content in Ross Douthat’s book. We're over halfway through, and Ross Douthat hasn't provided any evidence that any of these magical creatures even exist, much less identified any evidence for what kinds of personalities different magical creatures have.Maybe demons are the good guys, because God's kind of a jerk. Do you want me to feel differently about that? Do you want me to ignore fascism so that you can protect me from magical creatures that you can't even provide evidence for? Why would any sane person go along with that?Ross Douthat can't vouch for their character of demons being evil anymore than you can vouch for the character of his god and the angels being good.Ross Douthat has provided us with nothing to go on here. Zero.That is why Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.Not everyone believes.