The Christian Delusion: Introduction

In his anthology The Christian Delusion, editor John Loftus predicts what the Christian response will be to his book when he says, “What typically happens in every generation as Christians are forced to confront skeptical arguments against their beliefs is that instead of giving up their faith, they reinvent it (17)”   And like a chameleon that changes colors to protect itself from outside threats and dangers, Loftus lists the changes that he has seen in Christianity is his lifetime:

·         Christians  such as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig claim that Christian belief is “properly basic” and affirmed by the “inner witness of the Holy Spirit” respectively, in  an attempt to give the faithful a reason to sidestep the charges of skeptics

·         Hell as a place of fire and brimstone has been replaced with the idea as hell as an “absence from God” or simply annihilation from existence altogether.

·         “Open Theism” has led to profound changes among some Christians to God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence, namely that God doesn’t know the future and doesn’t have the power to change it.

·         Satan is now blamed for millions of years of animal suffering.

·         Preterism, the view that all of Jesus’ eschatological predictions were fulfilled with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70AD, is now embraced by Christians as a response to Jesus’ failed prophesies of his return.

·         Some have even given up on the idea of the supernatural altogether and claim that Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead physically, but rather spiritually.

·         And some are even embracing homosexuality

Loftus argues that Christians are deluded (thus the title of the book). He doesn’t claim that this delusion is a mental disorder, rather it is the result of built in social conditioning that trains one to believe and contains certain defense mechanisms to squash out doubt.   The critic will of Loftus will claim that mere disagreement among Christians does not falsify their entire religion, but that’s not the argument that Loftus is making.  His argument is that Christianity is ultimately a human invention that has survived due to its ability to adapt to the selective pressures from science, skeptics, and other faiths. Loftus himself is not deluded to think that mere refutations of traditional Christian claims will exterminate their faith.  He says that Christianity will change.  “The Christianity of the past was different than today’s…And the Christianity of the future will be just as different as the presently accepted one (19).”  Thus, Loftus’s challenge to the believing reader is to put their faith to the test, and to examine the claims of Christianity with the same level of skepticism that they apply to religious claims besides their own.