Hallo,
I am becoming interested in your point of view – it has attractions! – and have found your website because I would like to know more about it. I need to know much more of your reasoning behind rejecting the possible existence of a spiritual world.
In particular, I really need to know the true explanation you hold for the recorded resurrection and post resurrection appearances of Christ which at the moment is the biggest stumbling block to my understanding of your beliefs. I have read your answers to what happened to the body of Jesus but these opinions sound more fueled by personal beliefs than by careful study of the given facts.
I have already asked around but so far have been offered only the sillier explanations, such as the church authorities / disciples stole the body (priests would have produced it and disciples wouldn’t die for a lie), or it is a legend (too many reliable witnesses were still living at the time of the record), or Jesus didn’t die but only swooned (a sick man untended for three days able to roll away the stone and convince people he was a conqueror? Not that Christ would have been a party to a deception, from his recorded character. The tomb was sealed, and guarded, though one of your contributors denied this. The guards fell asleep and were punished). I have even seen hallucinations suggested for the post-resurrection appearances (real hallucinations occur to certain types, no two people experience the same ones, they are expected, occur at certain times and places, and recur over a long time. These appearances are said to have been seen by all types, all saw the same when together, disciples were not expecting them but defeated and hopeless, these appear anywhere and occur over forty days only and then stop.).
I can’t find any so-called inconsistencies between the different records that can’t easily be explained by arranging the given facts in time sequence. As for the claim that the records were later altered, there are copies going back to within a few years of the happenings and very many more in existence than for instance those that record Caesar’s conquests of Gaul, just as an example, yet no one doubts these.
I realise you must have a more intellectually acceptable explanation than any of these I have listed to be so confident in your beliefs so thank you in advance for your help in this matter. I have to be really certain of the facts and to have really good evidence. I am sure you will agree with me that the risks of finding out one’s beliefs were wrong at death are too horrific to contemplate!
Posted: October 29th 2009
Eric_PK
It’s very simple.
It’s fiction. Just like all the other stories about God and Messiahs that are floating around out there.
There is little if any contemporary corroboration for the stories of the gospels, and it’s well documented that the stories themselves weren’t written down until decades after when they supposedly occurred.
There is also documentation that there were widely different beliefs between Christians, with some following Arianism or Ebionitism and believing that Jesus was not divine.
This led to a lot of problems, and Constantine therefore convened the council at Nicaea to debate, and Constantine decided what was the correct interpretation (a pattern later continued by the Papacy).
Which books made it into the bible and which didn’t was also something that evolved over many many years, and it was common for groups to rewrite the gospels and other books to say what they wanted them to say.
The canonical version of the new testament wasn’t resolved until the council of Trent in the mid 1500s.
There’s tons of good information about this in wikipedia.
Finally, your reference to Pascal’s wager is a good representation of the amount of scrutiny most Christians have put on their beliefs. It’s clearly not as simple as you believe – Odin will not be happy with you in the afterlife since you believed in the Christian god.
Posted: November 2nd 2009
logicel
Your question demonstrates an inability to grasp that it is not evidence that there is no god that is the basis of atheism, but the lack of evidence supporting such supernatural beliefs. A negative can’t be proven – the burden of evidential proof is on the shoulders of religious believers.
And there is nothing in your account (you present the existence of Christ as a given, and we won’t mention the lack of extraordinary evidence required for this murky, quasi-historical character’s extraordinary resurrection from the dead) that would qualify as substantial evidence, as in the style of the interlocking body of evidence from many disciplines supporting the scientific theory and fact of evolution. That’s the gold standard. With religious beliefs such a standard is not to be had, that is why faith is necessary.
If substantial evidence was available, faith would have no meaning. Though you cite what you consider to be evidence, as a Christian, you most likely still have faith, despite what you call your evidence. Why is that? Why do you have faith if you claim to have evidence? If your evidence was significant, religious faith need not apply.
By all means, if such flimsy accounts sway you, feel free to continue in your faith-based beliefs. It is your right. Atheists do not have to present evidence that the Jesus story is wrong—that ball is still bouncing wildly about in the religious court, pushed hither and thither via the vapors of faith.
As far as the highly improbable facing a creator after having no belief in the supernatural during my life, I would say to that being what I am saying to you: There was not enough evidence to accept your existence. If there were why would you demand me to have faith? Why would you want your creation to be so gullible as to ignore the screaming lack of substantial evidence and not use the mind you gave it? Why did you play such a psychologically manipulative mind game? You call that divine love? If a parent played such a game like you have, the courts would have taken their children away from them because of the lack of love and consideration for the mental and emotional well being of their kids.
Then I would ask this odd entity who made it, in other words, who was its god. I would implore the god of this god to send its creation to a skilled psychiatrist.
Hell may not be nice, but I doubt Heaven is any better—you would have to hang out with that confusing, bullying, nightmarish entity with a forced and frightened smile plastered on your face for all eternity. I doubt a divine dictator would tolerate a frown. It would be a case of not wanting what you wished for. I much rather bask in its absence in hell, however hot it may be.
BTW, atheism is not a belief; it is instead a lack of belief in gods because of insufficient evidence.
Posted: October 29th 2009
bitbutter www
Richard Carrier makes an observation relevant to your question (emphasis mine):
In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened—by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin. Yet do we believe any of it? Not really. And we shouldn’t.
A person arguing for belief in the monk’s story might point out that since the story was written so shortly after the events it describes, if it were false, we would expect it to have been challenged by those in the know.
They might also object that we know of no plausible motive for this anonymous monk to have made these things up.
Despite these objections, we (I hope) have no trouble in understanding that these things didn’t really happen. For the dual reasons that these fantastic events are not corroborated by any independent source, and that they contradict what our daily experience tells us about how the world works. In short, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
We don’t have extraordinarily strong evidence for the extraordinary cliam that monsters sprang from a cursed tree, and we don’t have extraordinarily strong evidence for the extraordinary claim that a man came back to life after two days and floated into the sky.
Posted: October 29th 2009