John W. Loftus, in the essay “The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited,” says that “the best way to test one’s adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTF.” The problems of using this method, he admits, are 1. we are ignorant of our own ignorance. 2. We don’t see culture; we see with culture (we swim in a Christian culture, unable to see the forest for the trees). 3. Investigating other religions is like “meeting one’s own anti-matter twin.” Other people believe in their religion as fervently as we do ours and they are also successful professionals. The diversity of religions forces us to see religion as a culturally relative phenomenon. The question then becomes: If their religion is relative, then why is ours not? (Loftus) He says the overwhelming number of believers adopt and defend the religion they were raised to believe in by their parents. I disagree. Loftus says that billions of people have been brainwashed to believe, and if you have been brainwashed to beleive, it is critical that you take the OTF. The reason why Christianity took over the Roman Empire and is still growing today is because, according to the Urantia Book, Jesus is the God of our universe of Nebadon. His name was Michael and now he is called Christ Michael. Also, it doesn’t matter what your religion was when you pass, you will be accepted into the resurrection halls on the morontia worlds. This will be the start of your ascension to Paradise. I think some people reincarnate, but I don’t know much about that. I know some of my past lives. but I am not going to reincarnate this time.
Loftus crossed the line with me. He attempts to teach the reader how to free themselves from God or the god delusion. He says, “I’m asking believers to change their assumptions and/or become agnostics. For example, Julia Sweeney of Saturday Night Live, to face her fears, put on her “No God Glasses” for a moment to look around as if God did not exist. Then she put them on for an hour each day. (You) try this. As she faced her fears, she “began to see the world completely differently.” Eventually, she was “able to say good-bye to God.” THAT is sooo bizarre!! Loftus trusts science exclusively. It produces “consistently excellent results,” except when it doesn’t. Science has been wrong, and new paradigms have reluctantly been adopted. Einstein, for example, hated quantum physics. Evolution has riddles that have not been solved. Loftus maintains that “Christianity is growing phenomenally” in the Southern Hemisphere because, don’t you know, those people are ‘superstitious’. Skating close to the line of, not only racism, but arrogance, Loftus must have lost his social skills with his god. Later, he says, “we should be skeptical about that which we were led to believe even though we can’t actually see anything about our beleifs to be skeptical about. The logic of that advice is worse than the logic of the Resurrection. Nobody raised me as a Catholic or brainwashed me. I grew up in a church I hated and was an atheist before I became a Catholic. I don’t fit his description of the person who keeps and defends his parents’ faith. Maybe that’s not the right picture. People in this country are flocking to those megachurches.
Loftus says, “the scientific method is the only sure way for assessing truth claims.” But then he quotes William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist, who objects, saying, “Most of our beliefs cannot be evidentially justified. Take, for example, the belief that the world was not created five minutes ago, or the belief that the external world around us is real rather than a computer generated virtual reality…But surely we’re rational in believing that the world around us is real and has existed longer than five minutes, even though we have no evidence for this…many of the things we know are not based on evidence. Why should the belief in God be so based?” Physicists believed in the Standard Model before they could see atoms and electrons orbiting the atoms and other sub-atomic particles. But nobody complained that physicists were delusional. That, Mr. Loftus, is science, too.