Skeptical Embellishments About Christmas

A few days ago, I wrote a response to an article by Valarie Tarico about the events surrounding Jesus' birth. Let's take a look at a recent exchange in the comments section of Tarico's thread. A poster there, archaeopteryx1, wrote:

Recycling Bad Objections To The Accounts Of Jesus' Birth

Valerie Tarico has written an article about Jesus' birth that repeats a lot of common objections without interacting with counterarguments that have been circulating for a long time. And, unsurprisingly, John Loftus linked it. We've covered most of this ground many times before, but I'll respond to several examples of Tarico's argumentation.

Attack of the killer tomatoes

Valerie Tarico is a militant atheist who contributed a chapter to a book edited by John Loftus. She used to be a member of Debunking Christianity. She's a contributor to Salon magazine and the Huffingon Post. 

She recently published an attack on Mark Driscoll. Now, Driscoll is such a target-rich environment that a factual expose ought be sufficiently damning. Unfortunately, she didn't bother to do her homework. Ironically, one of Driscoll's leading critics has had to fact-check her error-ridden article:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/valerie-tarico-publishes-article-on.html

This illustrates the low standards of village atheists. Even when going after a soft target like Driscoll, with his overabundance of incriminating foibles and scandals, she can't be bothered to do the necessary research. 

Seeking God in the brain

Here's an article from The New England Journal of Medicine briefly reviewing "the neural underpinnings of . . . religion." The article concludes (emphasis mine):

Nonetheless, as imaging technology and associated cognitive testing become ever more sophisticated, we may be able to discriminate ways in which religious and creative sensibilities relate to one another and to brain areas that mediate emotions that are deranged in psychiatric illness. Whether any of these advances will provide the answer to the cerebral basis of religion, if one exists, is anybody's guess.

So for people like John Loftus and the other authors of TCD to definitively claim there's a neurophysiological and psychological basis to religious belief based on fMRI studies and the like is premature at best. Judging by the article, medical science is divided on the issue (to say the least).