As this is the Christmas season, my thoughts once more wander to the Christian faith and all of its trappings.
I have a friend who once argued with me that all of the religions resembling the Christ myth, were simply God’s way of preparing people for the coming of Christ. He quoted CS Lewis, who wrote: “We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan christs’: They ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.”
As I see it, you have two choices when it comes to the Christian Passion story:
- Christianity is a culmination of thousands of years of previous religious myths which are almost identical, including the resurrection myth, virgin birth, et cetera, from Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Sumerian, Persian, ad nausium other cultures. Evidence of such exists in vast quantities. Many ancient gods can be found who’s story tells of their death and resurrection – some nearly identical, such as Tammuz, an ancient Sumerian and Phoenician god who was said to have been born of a virgin, died with a wound in his side and after three days rose from the dead, leaving a vacant tomb with a rock at the entrance rolled aside. Among the others with similar stories are: Adonis, Aesculapius, Apollonius of Tyana, Attis, Dionysus, Hesus, Indra, Krishna, Mithra, Osiris, Prometheus, Wittoba and even Buddha.
- The presence of almost identical religious myths from previous cultures going back thousands of years is the prelude set up by God in order to help prepare Pagan cultures for the arrival of Christ.
Version one requires no supernatural influence at all. Myth is passed from culture to culture through time and is influenced by additional story tellers. Version two demands supernatural influence – where all the previous similar stories were influenced by God in order to “prepare” pagan peoples for the upcoming event.
Which is more likely; the natural, or the supernatural? Logic dictates version one to be 100% probable. Faith dictates version two, as a platitude for the data at hand.
Since the discrepancy is over the use of the supernatural in this context, it is up to those who propose such to burden the proof of such claims. Without any mumbo-jumbo, sorcery, godly influence or supernatural manifest, version one works and makes perfect sense.
Version two cannot possibly work, ever, without a belief or faith in the existence of said God to begin with. To believe that version two is even possible, you have to have faith in such because there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever from the outside to support the claim.
In fact, Christianity is unable to provide the tiniest shred of evidence to support their claims. They have testimony of a few anonymous individuals and nothing more. To embrace Christianity is to embrace the antithesis of logic – it is to stumble into the misgivings of faith – faith in an unsupported story.
Digging further in the construction of the Christian equation, it displays a continued disconnect from logical process. The standard argument for the very need of Christ, is for God to fulfill Old Testament requirements for a sacrifice for sin, so that the Jews could understand its significance. That sacrifice must be something valuable of God’s, his best and most personal – requiring the shedding of blood.
Why would you set up a system such as this for a specific group of people, broken down by a specific creed? This would mean that God is racist. As it stands in this system, God still made the rule that atonement was required. Why keep the rule? Is it serve his vanity? There is no logical reason that an omnipotent being could not change the rules to forgive and except everyone no matter what they believed. That would be true compassion.
The very idea of damning a person to eternal torture because they don’t accept another person’s testimony (with no corroborating evidence to back it up) is a ludicrous system for an omniscient being to instate. It would mean that gullibility is considered a virtue and logic is a vice.
Furthermore, Christianity does not answer any problem that exists outside of Christianity. The concept of sin, redemption and salvation from eternal damnation are all part of the same package that promises the answer to avoid such by believing and following the system. Without Christian mythology stating that there is a Heaven and Hell, there is nothing to be afraid of. Ultimately, it’s a protection racket.
Without Christianity, there is no Hell to be worried about. It uses a simple scare tactic: to accept the message of salvation, one must first accept the existence of a horrible afterworld to be saved from. Christianity does not provide evidence for either. It asks one to believe in an undetectable supreme being in order to avoid going to an undetectable horrible place and instead go to a better undetectable place after you die. Not a shred of evidence exists to support this construct. Even if the construct were true, it supports the general notion of a cruel and malevolent God. A merciful God would at least cause a cessation of existence to one who rejects him. Only an utterly selfish and evil being would condemn someone to eternal life in utter torture – for any reason. Why would anyone feel compelled to worship something with such an evil streak?
As for omniscience and free will – they are mutually exclusive. For free will to exist, the outcome cannot be known. If the outcome is known by God, and the being is created anyway – that is fate and a lack of free will. The only possible way that free will could occur while God is omniscient is for every possible choice by everything to happen in a construct of infinite parallel realities to this one, playing out all possible directions of decision simultaneously. In this you have free will and an omniscient God, but salvation and damnation by definition are simply impossible, as you would be required to inject fate by deciding which reality line to choose as being the only one that ultimately counts, out of an infinite number of realities. (You cannot pick a percentage of reality’s decisions either, as you cannot make a percentage of infinity.) Once you have made that decision, free will is rendered moot – the timeline of ultimate decision becomes a simple edict of God’s will of who is saved or not, even if they have made choices that would have lead them to salvation in other realities now ignored. The whole system falls apart.
When faced with the stories of Christianity and the acceptance of any of the material in question, it will always boil down to the question of faith. Faith is making the assumption that the material you are told or otherwise given is true, based on the perceived merits of the teller. No empirical evidence is required. This benefits the teller greatly, when no empirical evidence need be presented.
As Dan Barker, a former evangelist puts it, “Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.”
In the case of Christianity, you must accept that the Bible is the word of God and therefor true. What support does this claim have? Nothing other than the Bible itself saying that it is the word of God and the Church who claims to believe this and make the same statement. Pardon? Couldn’t any material prop itself up this way?
Even if I were to stoop to taking such serious questions as religion attempts to answer, on the basis of faith in witnesses alone, I am wary of the Christian witnesses. In his book, “The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence,” John E. Remsburg lists over 40 authors who lived during the time, to within a century of the time that Jesus supposedly lived and there is not a single mention of Jesus by any of these authors.
As Remsburg writes, “Enough of the writings of the authors named in the foregoing list remains to form a library. Yet in this mass of Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ.” (Many thanks to positiveatheism.org for providing this material online.)
Let’s not forget some of the events which were supposed to have occurred. Miracles left and right by Jesus himself; a Virgin Birth, resurrection from the dead, feeding the multitudes with fish and loaves that are pulled from thin air, and so on. One can easily imagine news of these events making the writings of the local literary craftsmen. However, even this pales to the sun turning dark, the earthquake and the temple curtains tearing and the saints rising from the graves and being seen by the multitudes in Jerusalem. That was the first century equivalent to the Hiroshima bombing: someone outside of a few anonymous authors of the Canon would have written about this! That they did not, is very, very telling.
Stories. The Bible is just a collection of stories, handed down in the latest recycling of a myth which has existed since ancient Babylonia at least. It is a work of semi-historical fiction.
Testimony, as it is, is worthless to the prime questions of existence. My challenge to any religious thought will always remain the same, please provide empirical evidence for your claims. Some may say that this is a “hard nosed” approach, or even disrespectful, but I have to counter that with a simple question: Why should I segregate religion into a different mental arena than the one I use for all of the rest of existence? I demand empirical evidence from science. I demand empirical evidence from government. I demand empirical evidence from everything else. Why am I a villain when I demand empirical evidence from religion?
There is nothing wrong in demanding evidence. It is what separates the mental wheat from the chaff. It is the demand of a logical process of thought.
Until someone can prove to me that embracing the illogical is a better method of thinking, I will demand empirical evidence for claims. The wilder the claim, the more evidence I will want to see. As Carl Sagan put it, “Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence.”
