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Should Christian beliefs be ridiculed?
If there is one thing that ministers of the gospel and fools fear the most it is ridicule. That is because ridicule is one of the most potent arguments against faith based belief and other forms of superstition - in fact there is biblical precedence for the use of ridicule.
Elijah used it against the priests of Baal. In 1 Kings 18:25 we read how Elijah ridiculed the false prophets of Baal.
Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire. So they took the bull given them and prepared it.
Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. “Baal, answer us!” they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made.
At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or travelling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed. Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.
Well of course the story of Elijah and the ridicule of Baal, is just that – it is only a story. But what if we were to carry out that exercise today and call upon trinity God to burn up the offering with fire from above, just like Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal? What would happen?
Christians ridicule others all the time. They ridicule the Theory of Evolution. They ridicule miracles of other religions. They ridicule tribal ancestral worshippers. They ridicule pagan traditions. So what makes their beliefs any less mock worthy than these others that they ridicule?
Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events. Thus Christian beliefs are no different to superstitions that they ridicule.
Most good Christians believe that the Bible is the word of God, a divine holy book, infallible, inerrant, and they believe literally in all the myths, stories, analogies, symbolism, types, shadows, etc as if they really happened. They believe in Noah’s Ark and the world wide flood, Moses and the exodus, the resurrection and ascension story of Jesus and the Adam and Eve creation myth.
Christians admit their superstition by predictably reacting to scepticism of these biblical tales with indignation and stating that : “if the Bible says so, that settles it” ! That’s admitting to superstition and is a religious cop out bordering on fanaticism as it is an assumption based on faith in the Bible as infallible in spite of the stories being ridiculous and most not even unique to the Bible but borrowed from earlier Sumerian and Babylonian superstitions.
Thank goodness that science has delivered us from superstition and reveals established facts that the Biblical creation story is not literally true, and demonstrates that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden are myths and not historical figures. (In fact the Genesis creation account is nothing more than a demythologised myth.)
We can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty. Homo sapiens originated in Africa 150,000 years ago and began to migrate 55,000 to 60,000 years ago. Scientific research confirms the “Out Of Africa” hypothesis that all modern humans stem from a single group of Homo sapiens who emigrated from Africa 2,000 generations ago and spread throughout Eurasia over thousands of years.
So dear Christians don’t expect me to believe Jesus was born of a virgin impregnated by an immaterial agent (ghost) You do of course know that Julius Caesar was also reportedly born of a virgin; Roman historian Seutonius said Augustus bodily rose to heaven when he died; and Buddha was supposedly born speaking. You don’t believe all that, do you? Why do you expect me to swallow the fables of Christianity?
Christian beliefs in biblical myths that violate natural law, contradict science, and fail to correspond with reality or logic are superstitious claptrap and qualify for ridicule.
