I Deny the Holy Spirit

The Blasphemy Challenge wants people to upload 30 second videos of themselves denying the Holy Spirit. The first 1000 people to do so get a free copy of The God Who Wasn't There, the atheism documentary, on DVD. I'd do it, because the entire notion of a Holy Spirit that pays attention when we say shit like "I deny the Holy Spirit" is really, really dumb, roughly akin to believing in a chronically obese elf who lives on the ever-thinning ice of the North Pole, quietly performing worldwide NSA-style surveillance enabling him to gather usable, up-close intelligence on the habits of nice and children, along with their relative preference vis-a-vis choo-choo trains vs. kewpie dolls.

The big deal is this passage from The Gospel of Mark.

"Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." - Mark 3:29

Of all the horrible shit you could possibly do, this is the only thing Jesus can't forgive. Seriously. Even the Mel Gibson defense doesn't work for denying the Holy Spirit. If Nicole Ritchie, moments before driving in the wrong direction on an LA freeway, had denied the Holy Spirit, she'd be damned to eternal hellfire instead of 30 days in county.

Apparently, the Holy Spirit just finds your lack of faith deeply, deeply disturbing, and It won't stand for it. I mean, Jesus has pretty strong, visceral feelings about dead baby rape, but he'll still forgive you. "You shouldn't rape dead babies," Jesus was known to say on occasion among close friends and apostles. "I probably shouldn't even have to give you a little allegory for you to understand this rule. I mean, it's a dead baby. Why would you want to rape it? Now let's go magic up some fish for those lepers!" Rumor has it, he was going to put it into the Sermon on the Mount, but dropped it to spare the feelings of his good friend Lazarus, who had infamously once raped a baby and who showed up to The Mount at the last minute. That just goes to prove my point. Jesus drew a line: Dead baby rape = okay if you're really sorry, denying the Holy Spirit = fire + brimstone.

Anyway, it only takes a moment and you have the added bonus of damning your eternal soul. I wonder if this could automatically get you out of listening to missionaries and evangelicals for the rest of your life. "Sorry, I can't come to Bible Study with you...I denied the Holy Spirit just, like, two weeks ago. Yeah, oops. It was just kind of a spur of the moment, hair up my ass kind of thing."

At Pharyngula, PZ has highlighted some funny responses from the believers to the video. Here are a few favorites:

So athiests think their immortal soul is worth a free DVD. Intersting; sad, VERY sad, but interesting none the less.

This person demonstrates a breathtaking ability to miss the point. Atheists don't think anything about their immortal soul because they typically don't believe in any such thing. Your sentence is a complete non-sequiteur, along the lines of saying "Americans think that a teleportation machine is worth 400,000 boxes of oatmeal raisin cookies."

I cannot convince people who have made up their mind already, but I will say that I am a witness of the working of the Holy One. You aren't required to believe me, though. It's your ball, and it's in your court now.

You hear these kinds of arguments all the time from 3 different kinds of people: goony film nerds, ghost hunters and God fearers. The "well, I've seen the evidence but I can't show it to you" argument.

Among film nerds, it's always some random cut of a movie that probably doesn't exist but that the person you're talking to has magically seen. "Seriously, man, there's a 7 hour version of Magnificent Ambersons where Joseph Cotton stalks, cooks and eats a live deer. I've seen it!"

For ghost hunters, it's always about this one experience - back when they were a skeptic just like you - that changed their lives forever. "And as I was walking up the hall, towards the music room of Benchley Manor, I could clearly see the undead form of Lady Benchley, pleasuring herself with Lord Pennington-Smythewood's antique clarinet! And she had on the same jewel-encrusted broach as she does in the locket we found in the secret panel of a hope chest in the attic!"

For fundies, it's always the Holy Moment when THE LORD GAWD interrupted their tedious little lives and showed them THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING. This commenter on YouTube has witnessed the presence of God. For seriously. It happened. So here's my question...Why doesn't God go and visit Muqtada al Sadr? "Hey, you...Stop sending out members of your militia to destabilize already-violent Baghdad neighborhoods! You have to listen to me, I'm God. I mean, Allah. Praise be my name, or something." God has way more important people to talk to than this schmuck.

Sorry to disappoint you all, but just because you are making your silly video's, that is NOT blaspheming the Holy Spirit. The only way to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to die in your sin, without repenting and putting your faith in Christ. You must first KNOW that Jesus Christ IS God, and that he IS the way, the truth and the life, and THEN deny him as God AND die in your sin without repenting and putting your trust in the saviour.

Hmmm...He/she may have us there. I'm pretty sure it doesn't count as blasphemy either, if you don't already believe in Jesus to begin with. But doesn't this contradict the Book of Mark? He doesn't say "whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit that already agreedt o believe in the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven."

lmao..the fact you even comment on the holy spirit proves you believe! If you really believed there's no such thing, you wouldn't be talking about it.

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect...

Why? I doubt many people would care if you believe in a god or not, so a generic claim like 'I deny the holy spirit' doesn't mean shit. What's important is the reason behind your claims. When you grow up enough to stop antagonising Christians for the hell of it, come back and explain your 'logical thinking.' Atheism isn't a fashion accessory.

No, atheism is not a fashion accessory. Now, Christianity on the other hand, that is most definitely a fashion accessory.

The use of quotation marks around 'logical thinking' here strikes me as very telling.

Atheism, really any of the agnostic/naturalist/academic belief systems, relies on what to me feels like a fundamental humility. You recognize that the Great Questions are always going to be just that - questions - and you resign yourself to accepting the best and most current information that those who study our world professionally can provide.

For example, I can grasp only the most basic conceptualization of something like String Theory. I know enough to understand that multi-dimensional models of the universe explain some issues but also create more unanswerable questions and that's about it. But I can't possibly understand this information the way an astrophysicist would, so I would have no choice but to defer my opinion on the subject to the expert should the situation arise.

This is essentially a humble stance, and sensible, educated people take them all the time. I look up to authorities in pretty much all aspects of life - novelists, journalists, scholars, scientists, activists, artists, world leaders, engineers. The list goes on an don.

I see this as running against the devout religious worldview. Fundamentalists and their ilk have only one source of authority. The Big Man in the Sky. And the great thing about God is that he's absent. He never talks to anyone any more, and his Book is full of all kinds of weird anachronisms, counter-intuitive messages and contradictory advice. So religious people get to act pretty much however they want. They don't defer to experts, their own leaders or even one another. It's a free-for-all.

And that's how you get religious people who hold the very notion of 'logical thinking' in contempt. They have a Righteousness on their side that defeats even the powers of Logic, much in the way that a thin slip of paper can surreptitiously cover a sturdy rock in the popular game. It's like being the Bully's Little Pal. Sure, you have to follow this guy around and pretend to be his best friend, but the moment he's not around, you run the schoolyard. You don't take shit from nobody, despite being the same little weasel they all once picked on.