“The Evangelical Resurrection Industrial Complex (ERIC) has churned out scores of scholarly tomes, hundreds of erudite disquisitions in professional journals, dissertations and commentaries, as well as debates and conferences beyond numbering, and the tsunami of dishonest verbiage shows know sign of receding.”
The lessons of the "doubting Thomas" story are not what you think. It does not offer any objective evidence that Jesus arose from the dead. It only offers us a story about a man named Thomas who asked and received objective evidence that Jesus arose from the dead. That's a huge difference. This story is no more to be considered objective evidence that Jesus arose from the dead than anything else we read in the gospel according to John. Yet, and this is the extremely important point, the story is told as if it's objective evidence Jesus arose from the dead! Let that sink in.
The whole point of the story is that faith is a virtue not a vice. The lesson is supposed to be: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." But to make that point the author uses story about a man named Thomas who saw what we did not, and cannot, see. We've never met the risen Jesus in the flesh, nor stuck our fingers in his side. So a story about Thomas cannot be our substitute. If this is supposed to convince readers then the author is asking us to believe based on insufficient evidence. If this actually convinces readers then they believe based on insufficient evidence.
This is the case even if a man named Thomas actually met the risen Jesus in the flesh, and stuck his fingers in his side! The reason is because we don't know he actually did this, because we were not there to see him do it. The lesson is that faith, blind faith, unevidenced faith, faith in a mere story about a man we never met, by an author we never met, is something praiseworthy.
By using this little bait and switch of his, the author of John's gospel is conning his readers. The gospels have been conning readers from the very beginning. No mere story about Thomas can be considered objective evidence for the rest of us. Period.
Let’s begin with a brief scene from the 1987 film Moonstruck:
Elderly woman at airline departure gate: “You have someone on that plane?”
Loretta Castorini, standing close by (played by Cher): “Yeah, my fiancé.”
Elderly woman: “I put a curse on that plane. My sister is on that plane. I put a curse on that plane that it’s gonna explode, burn on fire and fall into the sea. Fifty years ago, she stole a man from me. Today she tells me that she never loved him, that she took him to be strong on me. Now she’s going back to Sicily. I cursed her that the green Atlantic water should swallow her up!”
Loretta: “I don’t believe in curses.”
Elderly woman: “Eh, neither do I.”
If we could pose this question to folks coming out of their weekly worship services: Do they really want the God they worship? …we would hear enthusiastic affirmations, “Oh, Yes, I want the Lord! Our God is so wonderful.” But I wonder. Have they really thought it through? There are several things about this God that are a turnoff. Many of us would put he/she/it near the bottom of a list of gods to follow. Let’s look at a short list.
Since this is Good Friday, we should pay homage to Matthew’s effort to merge Halloween with Easter. He reported that when Jesus died on the cross, many people came alive in their tombs, then on Easter morning walked around Jerusalem. (Matthew 27:52-53) Even many Christians dismiss this as a tall tale, but this is awkward: how can they argue that the resurrection of Jesus isn’t a tall tale as well?
Now, on with today’s topic.
How much time and energy have Christian apologists devoted to figuring out why God allows so much suffering? In fact, apologetics is quite an industry; there is so much incoherence in Christian theology that has to be dealt with, but especially suffering. I once found a stunning bit of information in a July 1993 article by Peter Steinfels in the religion section of the New York Times. He reported the amazing achievement of scholar Barry Whitney:
Religious trauma results from an event, series of events, relationships, or circumstances within or connected to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that is experienced by an individual as overwhelming or disruptive and has lasting adverse effects on a person’s physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.
“Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” So said John the Baptist when he spotted Jesus heading toward him, according to the opening chapter of John’s gospel (v. 29). This gospel was written well after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. The Temple had been a great slaughterhouse, doing big business in the ritual killing of animals to atone for sins. John’s theology represents an adjustment, an upgrade from animal to human sacrifice: Jesus is the one and only Lamb whose death is needed to cancel sin. This is ancient superstition, a dramatic example of magical thinking, promoted even today by a vast church bureaucracy.
My focus in this article will not be suffering—colossal human and animal suffering—that is built into creation, and renders the concept of a caring, competent god incoherent and meaningless. There are three other realities that make Christian theology highly suspect, and contributed mightily to my rejection of the faith; that’s my focus here, but please be assured that the scale of suffering alone blasts Christianity out of the water. Nobody has said it better than Stephen Fry, when he was asked in an interview what he—an outspoken atheist—would say to God if the latter confronted him at the Pearly Gates:
“I’d say, bone cancer in children…what’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain? That's what I would say.”
It's time for atheist philosophers of religion to end their own sub-discipline under Philosophy proper. I explain in detail what I mean in my book Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End (2016). Below is an excerpt from it where I defend the new atheists Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Stenger from the philosophical elites. A few months ago I defended Hitchens' Razor. You can see the same dismissive attitude in both of these essays. I have no personal axe to grind. It's a principled disagreement. You can comment but before I'll respond you should first read my book.
Not long after the dawn of this new century, a New Atheism was born—at least it’s been called that. The best selling books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett stunned the Christian world: so much eloquent, outspoken criticism of theism. Perhaps the adjective “new” was meant to suggest that it was a fad, but these famous books spurred many other authors. By my count, well over four hundred books have now appeared since 2000, explaining in detail the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. These include, by the way, the five anthologies published by John Loftus—with two more in the works. In 2011, The Clergy Project was established, which is a support group for clergy who have become atheists. If there is no such thing as “new” atheism, there is a new level of energy and determination.
I sometimes indulge the frivolous thought that New Testament scholarship might have derived some of its inspiration from great mystery writers, e.g., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), Agatha Christie (1890-1976), and Dorothy L. Sayers (1983-1957). These authors imagined complex plots and their sleuths, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Lord Peter Wimsey, applied considerable ingenuity to discover whodunit. New Testament scholars, who have thrived when these authors were in their prime—and beyond—face one of the biggest whodunits ever, actually a multi-layered whodunit: how did Christianity come to be, how are the New Testament documents related, and how in the world can we figure out who Jesus really was, if he really was? Scholars have yet to agree on a methodology for identifying genuine historical data in the gospels—and they continue sleuthing to unravel multiple mysteries.
