God Who Cares? (Atheist), DeYtH Banger, VeNgeR GrEenTag [book club books TXT] 📗

the authority of our nation stems not from we, the people, in pursuit of happiness, but from the sovereignty of a “Lord” who dictates that we must submit to his will because a talking snake tricked us into eating the fruit of knowledge.”

- Dan Barker

“Warren’s entire book; others have already done that. Robert M. Price’s book, The Reason Driven Life, neatly exposes the fact that The Purpose Driven Life is nothing more than newly packaged old-fashioned biblical fundamentalism.”

- Dan Barker

“Before he became wealthy selling sanctimonious self-help (the “self” not being the reader), he was charged with abusing the IRS tax code. In the early 1990s, his church had paid all or a substantial part of his salary as a cash “housing allowance,” allowing him to report little or no income, taking advantage of a little-known, unfair provision in the statutes that allows “ministers of the gospel” to exclude their rent or house payments from income, greatly lowering their tax liability.8 What Warren did was clearly wrong—he was excluding his entire salary as if he were spending it all on housing. He was cheating the rest of us taxpayers. But since the law was ambiguously stated, not setting a limit to the allowance, he did not have to pay penalties or back taxes. Congress mooted the case in 2002, getting Warren off the hook, but clarifying that from now on the housing allowance is limited to the fair rental value of the home.9 This pastor, like most clergy, apparently feels that preachers are a privileged class. His parishioners might have a purpose-driven life, but their leader has a loophole-driven life.”

- Dan Barker


“he means it only in its secondary usage. “It’s not about you,” he preaches. It’s all about God. He believes you have no say in your own purpose. “His purpose for your life predates your conception,” Warren confidently informs us, speaking about the specific deity depicted in his holy book. “He planned it before you existed, without your input! You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.”
Warren is exactly right, if you think the Christian scriptures are true. The New Testament tells Christians that they have no purpose of their own: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”10 Jesus reportedly said: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”1”

- Dan Barker

“You are a hammer. A wrench. A pair of pliers.
Warren then insults atheists by insisting that those of us who do not hold his beliefs lead empty lives: “Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.”13 What planet is Reverend Warren living on? It seems…he hasn’t met many atheists. He doesn’t know that hundreds of millions of good people do not “begin with God,” do not believe in a god, yet live full meaningful lives. We are not the ones with the problem! We are alive. We think it is sad that so many human beings pretend to have no purpose of their own, that they are so willing to “die to themselves” (as the bible commands), submitting to someone else’s plan for their lives.”

- Dan Barker

“It is directed from outside your own life. “Whatever you do,” Paul also wrote, “do all to the glory of God.”15 Christians are toddlers who simply do what the parent says, “bringing every thought into captivity unto the obedience of Christ.”16 (The next time someone tells you there is freedom in Christ, read that verse to them. Whatever “captivity” is, it is not freedom.) In Christianity, the ultimate purpose is to glorify and worship the master, not to live or enjoy your own life. Even good works—which you would think should be aimed at the recipients of charity—are ultimately focused on the majesty of the heavenly father: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”17 The biblical writers were shameless about this redirection of purpose: “If I was trying to please men,” Paul wrote, “I would not be a slave of Christ.”

- Dan Barker

“What is wrong with this picture? We normally detest a person who claims to own and control other human beings, so why do we think it is admirable when God does it? Because might makes right? Why do we honor that which we naturally despise? If you were a god, would you actually want others to bow down and kiss your feet? And what would the rest of us think of you? If there actually exists a praise-thirsty deity like the bible describes, then why should we worship him? Because he is the big boss and he demands it? Because if you don’t put your hands together and tell him how great he is you will be sent down into the basement?

Would you rather watch a movie about loyal captive subjects in the service of their omnipotent master, or a movie about a slave revolt? Which would be more exciting? What characters would you root for and sympathize with? So, why just a movie? Why not make your own life a slave revolt?”

- Dan Barker

“Asking, “If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?” is like asking, “If there is no Master, whose slave will I be?” If the purpose of life is to become a submissive slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom you should despise.”

- Dan Barker

“Here is the good news we atheists offer to the world:
There is no purpose of life.
It may sound counterintuitive, but that is truly great news! Life is its own reward. You should not want there to be a purpose of life. You are not a subject. You don’t have an assignment to live up to. You don’t have a cosmic task to accomplish. You don’t have a duty to fulfill. You are not being managed or judged by an overlord. Unshackled from the chains of a master, you are truly free to live…”

- Dan Barker Bible Arguments (7)

 By DeYtH Banger



“Life is not driven by purpose; purpose is driven by life. You don’t have a purpose-driven life; you have life-driven purpose.
If you are still religious and are struggling with “what it all means,” then here is a purpose: get rid of the problem. Start a slave rebellion. Depose the dictator. Live your own life. In my books Losing Faith in Faith and Godless, I tell the story of how I went from evangelical preacher to atheist. It is not my task here to explain why I and millions of other good people do not believe in a god or an afterlife. I describe it all in great detail in those books. My point here is to show that whatever you think about the conclusions of atheists, you can’t claim that we lead empty, meaningless lives.”

- Dan Barker

“I dedicated my life to the service of my imaginary lord Jesus. I now see how thin and artificial the pretense was. Imagining that doing nothing is actually meaningful, I gained immense unearned respect from congregants who desperately wanted someone else to tell them how to live, how to think, how to find the purpose of their lives. There would be no shepherds without sheep. Like Rick Warren, I found a “calling,” a “purpose-driven life,” due to the fact that so many people think purpose must come from outside themselves.”

- Dan Barker

“It wasn’t until I got out of the master-slave ministry that I learned what real purpose is. Real purpose comes from solving real problems, not phony problems like “how can I be saved?” When I knew I would be leaving the ministry, after nineteen years of preaching, I had a concrete problem. I needed a job. I often hear from other clergy with the same dilemma: they have happily jettisoned their faith, but what do they do now? They spent years doing nothing of any real purpose: preaching, teaching, organizing worship, counseling parishioners, evangelizing, missionizing.”

- Dan Barker

“As I wrote in Godless, some of them end up in education, such as teaching philosophy, or go into social work, which are fields commensurate with their experience. Some go into sales—a different kind of evangelism. Some start their own business. But people are not cats: it is not easy to land on your feet when you have been turned upside down.”

- Dan Barker

“ “That’s it. I’m outa here.” It was like growing up and leaving home all over again,23 though this time I was actually glad to get out of the house. I could leave the ministry because I had a job, a way out, a purpose-filled life.
During those six months on hold, I had practically memorized the 68000 manual. My work was on the user interface, so I had to know what everyone else was doing. I had to see the big picture. Evangelism—
inviting people to become servants—was a small picture. I never knew a real job could be such a blast.
That project ended in about a year, so I needed another job. I heard that Safetran, a company that builds dispatching systems for the railroads, was hiring programmers. I drove to Cucamonga for the first real job interview in my life. (I didn’t have to interview for any of my earlier pastoral positions. I was invited to those churches, and all I had to do was accept.) I had limited experience and no degree in computers—I didn’t mention I had been a preacher—but the manager was impressed that I had programmed in assembly language.”

- Dan Barker

“I never preached about homosexuality during my entire ministry. We were all sinners, I believed, so why single out any group? But now, suddenly, it did matter. I had something important to say, and it wasn’t about insulting the “holiness” of a god by “choosing” a lifestyle that is forbidden by the bible. It was about offending humanity. God may be a delusion but the intolerance and harm that comes from faith is real. Religious discrimination is something actually worth preaching against and the lack of fairness is a noble problem to tackle.”

- Dan Barker

“I love that state of uncertainty when you know you have a problem that can be solved but you haven’t got there yet. I had felt that way when I was struggling with the question of the existence of God. I didn’t give up. “Something is wrong, and I can figure this out,” I often repeated. The brain goes full-speed ahead attacking the problem, then it backs off, looks around, combs the memory banks for similar or parallel situations. It gets ravenous for data, scavenging for clues. “Don’t give up, don’t give up. There is something to learn here.” After running out of ideas, you put it aside, sleep on it, try to sneak up on it laterally. During times like that, life definitely has purpose.”

- Dan Barker

“As the server task problem showed, sometimes simplicity is better than complexity. A universe with a god is more complicated than one without it. In order to fix all the bugs in the God task—the absence of evidence, the problem of evil, the