Author Archive for qmonkey

Lost Gospel of Herschel Goldman

Published
by
qmonkey
on March 12, 2008
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This is a true story that just missed being included in the bible by a whisker.
Herschel and Lucy Goldman are in their early 40s, living in Judea. They have a young family, Herschel is a tent maker and Lucy is a soccer mom. They worked hard all day and in the evenings they gather as a family for a meal, they always invite local people who have no family of their own to join them as they believe it’s how Yahweh wants them to treat others.

Every Saturday they go to the synagogue to worship God and pray for a messiah. They are praying for a saviour to free them from the Romans and bring peace to the region, a king of the Jews to lift them out of their hardships. They trust god who has brought them this far to continue to be at their side and help them know when ‘The One’ has come.

At this time there are regular rumours and mumblings of messiahs. People are so desperate for salvation, and some people seem willing to fall for any old claim. Hershel and Lucy are reasonable people, they believe that god will make it clear to them who is the one, and that they should trust him. While they have in mind what they are expecting, they know that Yahweh moves in mysterious ways so they tell their children to always keen an open mind.

Over the past week or so there had been another messiah claim, this time about a guy called Jesus of Nazareth, as always Herschel and Lucy were interested but not getting their hopes up. They believed it was important to keep hold of their god given rationale and not just fall for any claim, even though they dearly wanted it. The thing about Jesus is that he doesn’t seem to be this strong military leader who can free them from the Romans - this doesn’t quite ring true to what they were expecting, but they are so hoping for a messiah that they decided to keep a breast of the goings on.

One Tuesday morning a guy came in to buy a tent and says he’s believes Jesus is the messiah - Herschel asks him some questions

OK, why do you think he is the messiah?

First, because he says he is.

Okaaay… and?
He’s done miracles. he’s made blind see, lame walk etc

What!? Really? Thats very impressive tell me more, did you actualy witness this? Because if i belive he did real miracles, then im pretty much there - to beliving he’s god!
Well no, I heard it from a friend who says that he healed his fathers legs. Anyway he doesnt want you to see his miracles… he wants you to have free will.. and seeing miracles takes away that free will.

uh? did he do the miracles or not? My daughter Lisa is dying will he come and heal her? If God loves me as much as he loves your friend then of course he will - and I think I would be ready to believe it. Why would he want to make it difficult to believe - but at the same time prove himself to some people with miraculous signs?… i think i need to meet this guy

Well no, there’s a problem, he’s not here any more. He was killed by the Romans, but it’s ok his followers say that he rose again.

Ok, well that would be sure fire proof… when he comes to Jeruselem after his resurrection I’ll certainly go and see him - that might just be enough evidence for me. It would dishonour Yahweh to accept some random guy as his messiah without being sure (any charleton could say i’m god and can do miracles, but i dont want to show you, because it takes away your free will). It’s very different kind of messiah to what i was expecting - but i’ll meet him and assess the claim on its merits.

Well, unfortunately he didn’t have time to come back to Jerusalem to see us… he decided just to descend to heaven.

So you’re saying that the messiah came, but he didn’t want to make it too obvious to me that he was the messiah because he wanted me to have free will to believe… yet he did do miracles for some other people, so they had no choice but to believe. And your telling me im to believe your story about this or myself and my family are going to hell? I’m willing to stretch to the idea that the messiah might not the be powerfull king of the Jews im expecting - but don’t insult my god given intellegence!

Herschel and Lucy Goldman are now burning in hell for failing to spot that Jesus was the messiah

Blind faith or blinding faith?

Published
by
qmonkey
on March 7, 2008
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To early humans, the sun rose from its hollow in the ground, passed over their head, before submerging in the other direction into the earth. The wind and rain randomly gathered then passed. Flowers and vegetables magically emerged from the soil every spring bringing with it nurturing life and sustenance. All of this was tempered by the random terror of earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

Not only were there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory functions. In fact, the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction, the miracle of life itself, was a great mystery.

A few years ago, I read a book by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer entitled ‘Religion Explained.’ I don’t think it would be too much of a hyperbole to say that this was a turning point in my life. My intent on reading the book was to learn more how ‘other’ religions emerged. However, as a result of reading this book, the can of worms which was probably open before I started, spilled out all over the floor.

Boyer riffs on the idea that ‘blind faith’ is a healthy and natural human phenomenon. He argued that it is perfectly acceptable and even desirable that, before Galileo worked out that the earth isn’t the centre of the universe but in fact rotates around the sun, people needed the faith that the sun would rise every day (some did a morning dance just in case). They possessed no knowledge to rationally determine how or why it would. They had to make some assumptions just to get on with the business of living. In other words, it was completely helpful and normal to see it as a mystically defined ‘black box’ or even personify it as the workings of a deity.

I believe the point he was making is that this blind faith was ok and in fact helpful. When the Greeks gave names to these black boxes (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, and Zeus), the issues only arose after a few generations when the people started to take these gods literally, develop dogmas and then when a bright mind inquired how the stars fit in the sky - people called them a heretic for daring to deny the authority of Apollo.

Likewise Adam and Eve was a perfectly helpful algebraic black box until it caused people to limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.

Perhaps the unhelpful kind of faith is that which allows for acceptance of supernatural claims based on less than convincing evidence rather than the kind that helped Newton explain the natural world. It is the kind of faith which a makes a suicide bomber believe that he communicates intimately with a loving Allah or for a Christian who lives his life in the light the resurrection and virgin birth of Jesus, not because he is necessarily convinced by the evidence but because he has faith in the dogma.

I do not see this kind of faith as a virtue. In fact, in my opinion, it’s not blind faith, it’s a blinding faith.

- QuestionMonkey

A matter of process

Published
by
qmonkey
on January 7, 2008
.

I think it is fair to say that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from his own death, is the key historical event on which Christianity rests. I know many Christians who if in their heart of hearts came to the conclusion that Jesus had never turned water to wine or made blind men see, would still hold on to their faith as long as they were convinced of the resurrection. I also think that there are few people who truly believe the resurrection happened or that Jesus was the son of god yet do not consider themselves Christian. Conversely, people who don’t believe in the deity and resurrection of Jesus don’t really fall into the category or believer with which I am interested.

So what is the process from damnation to Christian salvation?

Discussions with believers tend to follow a consistent path. If I say that having read the gospels, I am unconvinced that they represent proof or even good evidence of the resurrection, they will argue sometimes very intelligently as to why the proof is good and why I am wrong to disbelieve. If I am honest with them and say that I remain unconvinced they say that I need to open my mind and let the spirit in… let Jesus do the work, he’s knocking at the door just let him in. Or something along those lines.

As I stated earlier in a previous blog, this leaves me in a quandary. Either I am not intelligent enough to understand how the gospels are reliable or my level of evidence requirement is too high. If it’s the former then it stands to reason that everyone who has accepted the evidence of the gospels is smarter and/or better informed than me. I don’t think that many of my Christian friends would accept that the loving creator god has built into the salvation narrative an intellectual filter to keep the idiots out of heaven.

Therefore what it must require is a lowering of the standard of evidence, opening my mind as it were, letting the holy spirit in. If nothing happens should I pretend that it has, or should I lower the bar some more until any old myth becomes plausible? The problem with this is what happens if Hari Krishna or Mohammad or Tom Cruise jumps in instead now that the bar has been lowered? Or for that mater, all kinds of new age hoo haa, myths and legends. Isn’t it a strange co-incidence that depending on their family and culture, a different faith’s ‘holy spirit’ tends to reveal itself when they ‘open their mind’. Surely I need to have read and accepted the gospels to know that when Krishna comes knocking on my heart that he’s actually a myth.

There may well be another route which I’m missing but most of what we consider goodness and progress in the world has come from the application of reason, intellect and clear-headedness - it shouldn’t be abandoned or compromised lightly.

- QuestionMonkey

How smart does one have to be to know Jesus?

Published
by
qmonkey
on December 13, 2007
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Lately, Christians have been challenging me on the intellectual case for Christ and the evidence for the resurrection. For most/all Christians it hinges on the resurrection, so I find that it’s best to concentrate on that as opposed to water-to-wine or heal-the-blind events, so let me sum it up the evidence/proof as proposed. (unfairly I’m sure they’ll say).

The disciples claim to have seen him alive, and later died for this… ‘people don’t do that’. 513 (or whatever) saw him alive after the resurrection.

Before I get to the main point of this, let me give my simplistic and probably ignorant assessment of that. The disciples saw him alive? Says who? Would they have any reason to exaggerate ? Is it possible they were traumatised? There are plenty of metaphors in the NT, are you sure it wasn’t a metaphorical resurrection they were convinced about, but over the decades and translations it was written as physical fact… because for them, the ‘visitation’ they had was as good as physical. Possible?

Of that 500+ people who apparently saw him… if im not wrong 500 of them were at one meeting, mentioned in Colossians (?). Now, are we sure it wasn’t 501, or 499, are we sure it wasn’t actually 300 or 50? And of those 500 how many where 100% convinced that it was him? Do we have at least letters of confirmation from them all? Or do we just believe this because 50 or so years later St Paul wrote it in a letter to encourage an early church?

Now as I said, im not too much with the smarts! Maybe it’s just that I don’t get it. But the hundreds of thousands of god-fearing child-loving charitable reasonable people at the time in Israel weren’t exactly falling over themselves to believe the resurrection. They quite reasonably said… well, ok if he really is risen again then can we see him? Is he going to come to Jerusalem again to say hi to Pilot and the Pharisees? OH THEY OF LITTLE FAITH!!

It could well be, that im not smart enough to understand the evidence, I admit this. Problem is, how smart does one have to be to be a Christian? Is Jesus only for the really smart people who understand why the evidence is good enough and should be believed? If not, then are we saying that we should teach our children to accept certain things on less than empathic evidence? Not only that but they should accept ‘unlikely’ things like resurrections on less than emphatic evidence?

I think I know where that leads… and it’s nowhere good.

The route from belief to unbelief

Published
by
qmonkey
on December 2, 2007
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“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into” Jonathan Swift (Irish writer and satirist)

“Belief cannot argue with unbelief, it can only preach to it” Karl Barth (influential Christian thinker)

Above are two quotes, both of which I tend to accept as sensible. So I’m trying to work out the implications of it for those who live inside a world of faith and those who live outside.

Following the logic in both these statements, it’s very difficult to ‘reason’ someone out of a faith position - certainly if it’s a faith held as a child.

My first question to Christians now is always ‘what made you first believe?’ - and if the answer involves the phrases ‘well I was brought up in a christian home…’ or ‘at the age of 13 i went to a camp…’ - it doesn’t mean their faith is any less real or valid, but as far as discussion goes, again I must refer to Swift and Barth.

Can the de-converted people on this site maybe take a moment to discuss what they think are the best ways to guide people from their prison of faith?

(excuse the inflammatory last statement :) )    - QuestionMonkey

Suspend your belief a while…

Published
by
qmonkey
on November 30, 2007
.

…what have you got to lose?

Jesus on the crossTake a walk with me for a moment - I’m not asking you to change your views, just to let your mind wander into hypotheses for a while. The Roman occupation was a difficult time and Jews were very open-minded about messiahs and were actively looking and praying for him. There were a number of messiah claims and rumors of messiahs at that time.

Jesus had, of course, come as a Jewish messiah. He was Jewish, and he was the man prophesied in Isaiah (or so you claim). He was there as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies - he had come to redeem the children of Israel, god’s chosen people. Yet the overwhelming majority of good, god-fearing, open-minded, ‘messiah wanting’ Jews decided, based on the evidence, that Jesus wasn’t the one. So much so that Paul and the other apostles decided that god was telling them to go preach to the gentiles. A cynical man would say that they came to that conclusion because the Jews were having none of the ‘messiah’ talk - so therefore god was ‘guiding them’ to try somewhere else (in the same way god guided me not to go out with Kate Moss).

How did the Jews come to this conclusion? They used the tools given to them by god (you’d say), their rationale and their reasoning. For them there was not enough evidence, even in the days, months and years after the event so intelligent, god-fearing, praying Jews came to the conclusion that Jesus was not the messiah. He was just another one of the ‘maybe he could be’. What would be the point of Jesus not leaving convincing evidence that he was truly the messiah?

Now think about what you’re asking of someone today in the early 2000’s. You’re asking us to examine the same evidence which did not convince the people who WANTED to be convinced, who waved him in to Jerusalem with palm leaves, and you’re asking us to examine this evidence through the distortions of time, translation and probable well intentioned re-remembering to fit the mission.

Now continue on this walk with me, and really ask yourself what it was which first made you move from a position of never hearing the name Jesus to deciding that the evidence was good enough to come to an earth shattering conclusion that he was the son of god. Think about the times in your life since when you’ve felt that god was speaking to you, guiding you, when you’ve felt “god’s hand” on a situation. Ask yourself whether there is an iota of a chance that in actual fact there is no father-figure god watching over you - or if there is - there isn’t enough evidence for it. Believing things on insufficant evidence is what leads to David Koresh, Scientology, Reiki, Astrology and the rest.

I submit that you must at least acknowledge that even if the resurrection did actually happen, it’s REASONABLE to come to the conclusion that it did not, and consider the implications of that. The implications for you will be too much for you to accept - but I humbly submit that as a thinking man you must give the notion some room, and that the notion can never be given room while you continue with the faith affirming rituals of the church and the logic-loop of praying to the god you only know through Jesus for wisdom to understand if/why Jesus is his son.

- Question Monkey