Transcript

Sometimes I can't tell the difference between a Christian meme mocking atheists and truly awful atheist memes that mock themselves.

So, let's jump into the topic of today's episode and examine 10 truly awful online atheist memes.

Number one: Only a lie has different versions and it shows different versions, allegedly, of the Bible.

First, there are different versions of this very meme.

Does that mean that the meme itself is a lie?

And there's only different versions of the Bible because some canons of scripture have different numbers of books, such as the Protestant canon missing the seven Deuterocanonical books of scripture.

What this is probably referring to are different translations of the Bible, but works written in different languages have different translations.

The writings of the Greek historian Thucydides have different translations or versions, but that doesn't mean the ancient Peloponnesian War he describes never happened.

Number two: Religion is legalized madness, a quote from Arthur Janov.

Now, this is hilarious, because Janov is a psychologist who invented the now discredited method of primal therapy.

He basically said you can heal your mental health by screaming about past trauma.

What do you feel?

Or by directing anger at a substitute for someone who hurt you, like a doll or an empty chair, as demonstrated in this clip from The Simpsons.

Tell this dummy mother exactly how you feel, right now.

I'm annoyed with you, Mother.

Not just annoyed, angry.

I'm a grown man now and I can run my own life!

Calm down.

Calm down.

Oh, moving.

But sure, religious people are the mad ones.

Number three, and this is a sad one: It's a girl holding a sign that says, According to religion, I am broken, flawed, sinful, dumb, weak, nothing.

And on the other side it says, According to science, I am full of wonder, smart, a great learner, beautiful, and potential for greatness.

Which do you think is more damaging?

What's damaging is thinking you can get your value from science, because science can't tell us anything is valuable.

Science can find patterns in things we know are beautiful, but science doesn't prove beauty.

That's a value judgment, just like greatness and full of wonder are value judgments.

Human beings are full of wonder and beauty and have potential for greatness, but we also have a potential for evil, because we are flawed, weak, and sinful.

We know this every time we do something wrong.

But we are not nothing.

Science says we're just leftover atoms from the Big Bang, but religion says we have potential for greatness because we are made in God's image and can live with God for all eternity.

Number four: The greatest threat to mankind are death cults, namely Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Now, this ignores acts of terror committed among Hindus and Buddhists, and of course the biggest perpetrator, state-enforced atheism through communist regimes.

We shouldn't judge a belief system by the conduct of its worst members.

We should judge it by the evidence for that system.

But if we have to compare its worst members, militant atheism has nothing to brag about.

Number five: Listen to your heart!

And the woman's heart says, God is merely a figment of your imagination.

Okay, but what about people like the majority of people who have ever lived on the face of the Earth whose hearts tell them that God or the transcendent is real?

And what about people who choose to follow their hearts when their heart tells them to do evil things?

In fact, this same account shared this quote: Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism.

But wait, I thought people were beautiful and full of wonder and it's only religion that makes them weak and sinful creatures.

Oh, so now it turns out we have to teach people, i.e.

indoctrinate them, to not follow their hearts or to not follow their instincts when their instincts might tell them to do something wrong.

This shows morality is not something that comes from evolution, but must come from a universal transcendent source beyond time, place, and culture.

Gee, what might that be?

Number six: Jesus never existed!

We have Bart Ehrman, the favorite go-to scholar for skeptics, and texts saying Jesus isn't mentioned in archaeology and the Gospels were written later.

But this meme is incredibly stupid because Bart Ehrman wrote an entire book defending the existence of Jesus.

It's called Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.

Ehrman does say there is no archaeological evidence for Jesus, like ancient inscriptions, and while we have archaeological evidence for things like civilizations, it's a lot harder to find this for individuals who were not rulers, like Jesus.

We didn't even have archaeological evidence for Pontius Pilate until the Pilate Stone was discovered in 1961 bearing his name.

And Ehrman notes that the Gospels do give us historical facts about Jesus, even though they were written a few decades after his death.

He even has an article called Gospel Evidence That Jesus Existed.

So, trying to use Bart Ehrman to prove Jesus mythicism is as dumb as trying to use Richard Dawkins to prove young earth creationism.

And a runner-up to this meme would be this comment: How can you tell Jesus existed?

Video or it never happened.

By this logic, nothing happened before 1888 when Louis Le Prince recorded a friend's garden.

Number seven: When you cheat on your husband and accidentally create a whole religion just to keep it a secret, in reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Of all the low IQ atheist takes that exist, this is getting into negative numbers.

I mean, dude, it's the first century.

If you want to cover up an affair, there's way easier ways to do that because there's no DNA testing.

Instead, you're saying a bunch of people came to believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead because his mom made up a story?Cool story, bro.

Number eight: You have no right to call people mentally ill if you believe in an invisible man in the sky, in reference to those who would say that transgender ideology is a symptom of mental illness.

First, though, if you believe in transgender ideology, then my simply claiming that God exists should be proof that God exists.

If you say God does not exist and I identify as a child of God, then in saying God doesn't exist, you are denying my identity.

You are literally committing religious genocide against me.

And number two, I agree that if I said there is an invisible man in the sky in a certain location and we fly a plane up to that location where he's supposed to be and there's just empty space there, then yeah, that's mental illness.

Likewise, if you say you are a woman and the place where female genitalia is supposed to be present, there is male genitalia and male chromosomes, then yeah, you're suffering from a mental illness that should be treated with compassion and not be celebrated.

Number nine: If the person offering you salvation is also the one threatening you with punishment, it's not really salvation, it's extortion.

This doesn't work because extortion involves a punishment a person does not deserve in order to motivate him to accept an offer that's not good for him.

Like when a mobster says, You got a nice store here.

Be a shame if something were to happen to it if you didn't pay your protection money.

But if the punishment is deserved, if it is just, and the person administering the punishment offers a means to be saved from it, then that's mercy, not extortion.

If a judge who could justly sentence someone to jail says he will void the punishment if the guilty party sincerely apologizes to the victim, then that's merciful salvation.

Likewise, if a doctor says that smoking will give you lung cancer but if you take a certain drug you can be saved from cancer, that's not extortion.

The doctor isn't threatening you with lung cancer.

He's warning you that this is the natural consequence of your freely chosen actions.

In the same way, if God says sin will make you miserable because it involves rejecting perfect goodness, possibly forever, this is not God inflicting arbitrary punishment.

It's him telling us about the natural consequence of our actions.

And in His perfect mercy, God offers all people a way to be saved from their sinful decisions.

And finally, number 10: DOG: Unconditional love.

Worships you forever, regardless of what you believe, compared to GOD: Conditional love.

Worship him forever or he'll send you to hell.

This doesn't show what's wrong with religion.

It shows what's wrong with being a cat lady, or a cat man, I guess.

Imagine you ask someone, Hey, why don't you have friends?

Or Why don't you want to get married?

And the person said, Ugh, people are the worst.

They expect you to care about them and do things for them, and if you're mean to them, they don't want to be around you anymore.

That's why I love Mittens.

Mittens never leaves me no matter what I do.

This doesn't show the foolishness of believing in God.

It shows the foolishness of thinking you are God and should be the object of other creatures' worship, when as a rational human being, you should be seeking out what is better and more beautiful than you and conforming yourself to that reality.

All right.

That's gonna do it for us today.

Thank you all for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.