When you don’t bother to have your work checked…
The payoff, of course, is that we don’t
When believers set out to defend the faith, they commonly find themselves entangled in Christianity’s multiple, messy contradictions. When backed into a corner, we may hear—with sighs of exasperation— “Well, how did all this get here? It didn’t just happen!” God-the-creator is the default, retreat defense. “Whew, that should settle it! Don’t be daft, you silly atheists, you’re talking nonsense to claim there isn’t a Great Engineer behind it all.”
Theologians boldly rise to the occasion
What to do when God has favored you with new revelation? I don’t mean just a casual vision or two—but with a Cosmos-shattering revelation update: You have been given the word that God has revised a whole salvation scheme. How do you mesh this new scheme with the old system in place for centuries? We see the apostle Paul wrestling with this very task in chapter 4 of his Letter to the Romans.
Religion wins if we can’t teach our brains Good Thinking
In the musical My Fair Lady, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner punctured misogyny by showing it in full foolishness. Professor Henry Higgins is the ultimate “confirmed old bachelor” who is distressed by his attraction to Eliza Doolittle. He bluntly warns his friend Colonel Pickering, “I will never let a woman in my life.” Female heads, he declares, are “filled with cotton, hay and rags.” “Straightening up their hair is all they ever do. Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside?”
But Professor Higgins was only half wrong. That is, all human brains, male and female, are prone to the cotton-hay-and-rags syndrome. Throughout the millennia, humans have been wrong about so much, and—sorry, Professor Higgins—men have been the major culprits. We can blame the men especially for the monotheism represented in the Bible—a major mess of contradictions, if ever there was one. But the fault lies not with gender, but with the brains that we owe to the clumsy evolutionary process. We have to work hard to outsmart our brains.
For Paul, sin was a disease of the soul...he was sure he knew the cure
Here's a Christian named Angie on Facebook about testimonial evidence of the resurrection of Jesus:
Angie: "One method of determining good evidence is the testimony of others. Courts use testimony all the time and consider it in making decisions. We have the testimony of several hundred people who saw Jesus after his death and burial. This must be considered in believing or denying this event. One day there might be an explanation of this, but not yet."
My response:" Would you and others keep your facts straight? We don't have evidence 500 people saw the resurrected Jesus. What we have is someone SAYING 500 people saw the resurrected Jesus."
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Angie: "What's so preposterous about one's testimony? Used all the time in court as respectable evidence."
My answer: "We have no way to cross-examine this testimony. How do we know the results would not be exactly as we found out with Joseph Smith and Mormonism? You're asking us to accept non-cross examined testimony from a couple of different writers in the ancient distant past, and that's not reasonable for extraordinary miraculous claims."