Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

"You ask me how I know he lives?" asks the revival chorus. "He lives within my heart." Exactly! A figment.

What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.

The born-again gospel promises joy and peace of mind, but it does so by prolonging childhood.

The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own.

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.

Speculation is not knowledge.