The Atheist Blogger

An article written by The Atheist Jew (sourced from a Reuters article) reveals that 44% of American adults have changed their religion from the one they were raised up with.

The majority of those people converted from a religion to some form of non-religion (whether it be atheism or a form of theism), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses saw the lowest retention rate, with only 37% of followers staying with the religion in adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the Protestant churches are gaining in numbers due to the relaxed approach, and the Hindu religion (which is also pretty relaxed) is retaining 84% of it’s members.

Some pretty interesting facts and figures.

This week at my university, the Christian Union are holding a “Jesus Awareness Week” (J.A.W) and although I am only involved in one of the events (a debate on Thursday), I am trying to attend as many as I can. Last night’s talk was on the Bible (as the title of this article suggests), and the speaker was the son of Michael Howard. He came up with a list of reasons why people should trust the Bible:

The Bible proves itself to be trustworthy. It’s so obviously true that we don’t need to question it’s trustworthiness.

Yes, he actually opened his argument with that one. The standard circular argument that goes against all common sense and justification. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if he hadn’t stated that that reason alone should convert you to Christianity. If it were so “obviously” true then rational people wouldn’t reject it, or go and worship other Gods.

The Gospels are based off eyewitness accounts from people who were alive at the time of Christ.

John was written around 90A.D, and he used this as an example. Given that the average life expectancy of people back then was much lower than it is today, the chances of someone actually seeing Jesus perform a miracle, and then living to be over 70 (if we take it as read that they would have to have been around 10 years old at the time of Jesus’ death) are remote at best. Even if this did happen, the eyewitness accounts of a child are rarely 100% accurate, and so we would have to find an eyewitness who lived to be around 76 at least, which 2000 years ago would have been even more miraculous than walking on water.

Not one of the gospels mentions the destruction of Jerusalem in 70A.D, so they must have been written before 70A.D.

This point was filled with pure inaccuracies, as I have already mentioned that the Gospel of John was written around 90A.D, and the Gospel of Mark was written after 70A.D since it does contain references to the fall of Jerusalem.
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