They just say NO to their Lord and Savior
When you’ve been nurtured on ideas since early childhood—they’re a source of comfort and derive from adults whom you trust—it can be hard to see that some of the ideas may be truly weird. This is especially true of the gospels, which remain, for far too many of the faithful, unexplored territory. There may be passing familiarity with gospel stories, based on texts read from the pulpit and heard in ritual. Of course, Christian children’s books have played a major role in making the best Jesus-script well-known, e.g., in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), and “God so loved the world…” (John 3:16, may or may not be Jesus-script: there was no punctuation in the Greek manuscripts.)
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.Since we’re alive we must make choices, even if they are determined ones. So why not make those choices good ones, even though those choices are determined ones? At the time we choose we don’t know which ones are determined to be. So the fact that they are determined doesn’t affect which choices we make. Live then, as if it’s all up to us, knowing it’s not up to us. It doesn’t change how we should live by knowing that our choices are determined.
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. — Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1943).
In my critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay competition on the “best” evidence for life after death and my response to the summer and winter commentaries on it, I made reference to striking similarities between the arguments made by Christian fundamentalists and survival researchers (i.e., those who purport to investigate survival of bodily death scientifically). In this three-part guest post, I’d like to highlight or elaborate on fifteen or so examples of how those at the forefront of “scientific” research into an afterlife—or in BICS’ framing, the survival of human consciousness after death—have consistently used fallacious arguments that mirror parallel arguments prominent among fundamentalist Christians.
Rise above the credulity expected in Sunday School
For many, many people, reading the gospels eyes-wide-open for the first time can prompt serious doubt—and their departure from the Christian faith. It’s awfully hard to divest the gospels of that aura of holiness promoted by the church: the gospels are the greatest story ever told—their authors were inspired by God himself. It’s not uncommon for congregations to stand when the ritual includes a reading from the gospels.
But an adult mentality can kick in, i.e., the assumption that I can “spot a fairy tale when I see one.” For example, eleven verses into Mark, chapter 1, we read that a “voice came from heaven” announcing to Jesus—at his baptism—that he was God’s son. But very few of us believe that gods make announcements from the sky. In Matthew, chapter 1, verse 20, we’re told that an angel of the lord tells Joseph in a dream that Mary is pregnant by the holy spirit. Most of us have weird dreams from time to time, but we don’t believe they’re messages from a god.
Aimed at Catholic, Pentecostal and Evangelical audiences
The church has always promoted an idealized Jesus. Magnificent cathedrals, with depictions of Jesus in stained glass and sculpture, illustrate the success of this strategy. For its first 1,500 years laypeople didn’t have access to the gospels, so they trusted what their clergy told them about Jesus. Even after the Bible was finally widely available—due to the printing press and translations into the languages of the people—careful reading of the gospels doesn’t seem to have caught on. Surveys have shown how little churchgoers read their Bibles.
And the Christian bad habit of being OKAY with it
On Saturday, 10 June 1944—four days after the Allied landing at Normandy—the rural village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in Vichy occupied France, was surrounded by an SS Panzer division of German soldiers. They rounded up all of the residents, forced the men into barns and stables, the women and children into the church. Then, with machine guns and fire-bombs, they murdered all 643 of them: 462 women and children were killed in the church. The women had felt safe in the church, because, of course, that’s where God is paying the closest attention to those who worship him. So how could a caring, attentive, powerful, competent god have allowed this savagery to happen? “God is good, God is great, but since he works in mysterious ways, he allowed the German soldiers to do their job that day.” Such a response illustrates the all-too-common incoherence of Christian theology: it doesn’t make sense.
Two years ago yesterday, Dr. Hector Avalos passed away. He was a distinguished scholar and a cherished friend, and he passed away much too early. In the current issue of MAARAV, I wrote an "in memoriam" regarding him. I have pasted it in below.
In addition, I should like to mention that in this issue of Maarav, one of Hector's final articles (perhaps his final article....I'm not entirely sure) is published, one entitled "By Him" or "Against Him/Them" in El Amarna 364:23?: Implications for the Destruction of Hazor. It's a very fine article and I sort of look at this as a core love of Hector's: history and philology. I'm so glad that this article appeared in Maarav. He had hoped to live to see it in print....this was not to be...but I'm so glad that it appeared within our pages. And again, the full "In Memoriam" is pasted in below.
I’m giving away free copies of my book on Easter Sunday! Just click here. It’s received some high praise!
Barring any glitches it’ll be free
on Amazon all day April 9th, from 12 AM until 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight
Time. I’m hoping you’ll recommend it to others.
THAT would help pay it back.