I’ve heard Christians say that what one must do is look at the life of Jesus, and decide what you make of him. This is the basis of Alpha Courses and, in my experience, it’s the way many Christians approach Christian apologetics or evangelism. ‘What do you think Jesus meant when he said x?’ ‘What did it mean for the Jews when y happened?’ ‘Wasn’t the love shown by x to y a perfect sacrifice as prophesied in z?’ etc etc.

The conceit is that the Bible, is reliable reportage – miraculously accurate and by its very nature irrefutable. Christians believe there is enough evidence to decide that water was turned to wine, dead men were raised and thousands of ready cooked fishes materialized from thin air. And furthermore, that there was no other important (perhaps more private) relevant statements made that were not reported in the book.

Surely the decision to believe this is at the very least a cognitive event. In the same way that I do not believe in ghosts (until convinced otherwise) I need to decide whether I accept the Bible / Koran (or 100s of other religious holy books) to be reliable. The tools I use to make this decision must be, for the most part, external to the stories/claims contained within the texts. The Koran making a statement that the Koran is true and I must accept that or go to hell, frankly is not very convincing. The same applies to other holy books. In fact, I could write one tomorrow, say something similar, let it mature for a few thousand years, and have just as much credibility.

However, once I have come to the decision that the Bible IS reliable, then its game over, you can consider me a Christian (same for Koran/Muslim). I propose that there is no one, of sane mind, alive on earth who accepts that the Bible is accurate in its reportage of what Jesus did and said… who still says he is not a Christian.

I state again, if you think the Bible is accurate and reliable, then there is no need to get involved in manipulative pleas like ‘Jesus loves you, just reach out and accept the gift, let him into your heart’. It’s irrelevant how ‘caring, wise and loving’ Jesus was. If he’s god, he’s god. Even if he’s a genocidal monster I’ll bow down since you had me at ‘accurate and reliable’. One does not need to meditate on the nature of Jesus and decide if you want to follow him – his reported personality and acts are totally dependent on the quality of the reportage. Furthermore if you try to hear mystical voices in your head (or your heart!?), its very likely they will oblige.

So why do Christians not say this? Why are the Alpha Courses and sermons structured with questions such as: Who is Jesus? Why did Jesus die? How does God guide us? Why are these so-called courses (and indeed sermons) not spending time proving the accuracy of the gospels, and leaving it at that ?

Why? Because even if we take the disastrous leap of assuming the bible is reliable before analyzing ‘why’… the logic has to be that redemption actually comes from accepting the Bible as accurate, rather than admitting you’re a sinner and that Jesus was the son of god etc etc.

Deciding whether or not the Bible is reliable is a cognitive action. How do we make cognitive decisions? – through analyzing the evidence. How do we make better decisions? Through application of our intellect and education. It’s obvious, but needs stating, that the better our intellect and education, the more likely we are to make correct analytical decisions.

Therefore the smarter one is, the more likely they are to be a Christian? Hmmmmmm. This certainly isn’t my observation.

Christians will then insert the ‘faith’ word. However, any old faith won’t do. It needs to be faith in the ‘correct’ god. So unless people who have never heard of the bible are having Jesus-redemption narratives miraculously planted in their heads (which actually wouldn’t require any faith either) – we’re back again the reliability of the bible.

Fact is that the overwhelming majority (90% according to one statistic) of people on earth carry on with the world-view of their parents and they can’t ALL be correct. -

If they seek a better understanding of the world around us, anyone who holds the religious world view which is prevalent in their society needs to be ultra skeptical about it, and assure themselves that the tenets are objectively reliable. ESPECIALLY if their holy book tells them not to put it to the test!

Humbly submitted

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.

…what have you got to lose?

Take 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 we’re actively looking and praying. I imagine 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 (you claim). He was there as the fulfillment of the Old Testament – 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 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 it – 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 , clever, god fearing praying Jews came to the conclusion that they had been wrong about Jesus, he wasn’t the messiah, he was just another one of the ‘maybe he could be’. What would be the point of Jesus not leaving convincing evidence?

Now think about what you’re asking of someone today in the early 2000s, you’re asking us to examine the same evidence which didn’t 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 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 god was speaking to you, guiding you, when you’ve felt ‘gods 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. Beliving 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 didn’t… 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.

Jimlad wants some blog juice… here you go

I think all I’m asking for, is your evidence criteria when it comes to supernatural events.  I hope we can move on from the ‘define supernatural’ argument  which I don’t think leads us anywhere.

You’ve asked me to define clearer what I want you to apply your intellect to, so I’ll give it a go.

I’d like you to tell me what parts of the bible you take as reliable reportage and your reasons for this?

When it comes to the resurrection, will you acknowledge that the more significant or unlikely the event, the more evidence we need to believe it. If I say I drove to work today, got out my car, bought a paper, then flew up the side of my building… none of these things might be true but you’ll only ask for compelling evidence on the last bit for obvious reasons.

Even though I have no compelling proof, I accept that Jesus entered Jerusalem around 30AD, had followers who believed he was the messiah, and was put to death on the behest of the Jews around 32AD.  But to believe he rose from his own death needs really good evidence – and I think it’s also reasonable to propose that if he did, there’s no reason that he’d want to hide it. Appearing to disciples, even if he did, wouldn’t be enough for anyone (and he’d have known this – given the ‘rationale’ he ‘blessed us’ with)… and appearing to a few more randoms would be insufficient. If he had then given his very public last 3 years of his life, he would have ridden in to Jerusalem again to show the people, the Jewish rulers and the Romans that it had happened. Or is it that he didn’t want to give us TOO much evidence? and is that not stretching your intellect a bit. (next you’d be saying the devil planted dinosaur bones to confuse us)

You say that people don’t die for something that they haven’t seen… my answer is – I dunno – im sure people have, have no examples… but in any case  the amount to which they belived it isnt evidence… Maybe they decided that god was telling them to say that it was the litteral person of jesus – maybe they never said it was and it got exagerated – in any case thats for you to prove not for me to disprove. You won’t deny that the deciples where tramatised and certinly ‘wanted’ to belive it… not the most reliable people at this time – and certinly not reliable when it comes to this point.

What the apostles belived they saw is no more evidence than the loads of people have ‘seen’ mary (or elvis or aliens or whoever) appear to them… and I don’t think they are lying, I think they really believe it – and if they were being threatened with death because of it… they wouldn’t suddenly say… ah ok  you got me, I was lying just for the laugh.

I’ve I remember right one of the gospels talks about Jesus appearing ‘in a different form’ to them … which smells to me very much like metaphor… and I think another gospels talks about Jesus appearing to people who were ‘kept’ from  recognising him.  Hmmm. Lets make my position clear though , for numerous reasons I don’t accept the bible as historical reportage anyway. (you do?)

To believe the resurrection based on the evidence, I think, isn’t really sustainable. There is no compelling evidence to belive such a massive and universe changing event happened and certinly not enough to constitute proof of a paradigm changing event of this kind – i humbly submit. If the ‘real’ messiah returns tomorrow to liberate the jews, you might feel pretty silly.

My issue is thus. This is a good argument as to why anything is theoretically possible – but it’s not much more than that. You could substitute the names of countless other religions for Christianity in there and it still holds. I concede, its only circular reasoning, if I don’t accept the first part – but that’s kinda the point – it’s the premise which is contentious. Either you have enough evidence to convince me or you don’t. If you do then, flip, we should be teaching this stuff in school the same way we teach about Henry VIII wives – and by the way ‘faith’ doesn’t come in to it. If you don’t claim to be able to convince me with the evidence then it starts to look a bit like you are trying to literally ‘blind me with science’ (im not lumping you in, but it’s a great creationist tactic also).

I put it to you that you are knocking down a straw man in this post – which serves to give believers a warm glow, but I can’t see many unbelievers running to their nearest church to get on their knees.

My cousin Brian is a good lad, dead friendly and good craic. He left school at 16 without any qualifications, he’s never read a book, he doesn’t know who the prime minister is, couldn’t point to Israel on a map. He’s not too much with the smarts as they say – though maybe if he’d lived 500 years ago he’d be of average intelligence and education.

Now, are you saying that Jesus didn’t die for him, as much as you? Are you saying that he should just accept what you tell him with out investigating the facts? Is there a certain level of intellect which one must have in order to be able to understand the importance of Jesus? Would you advice anyone to just believe in any religious claims without checking out validity of them… or just accepting it because some ‘smart’ person like the Dali Lama, mitt Romney, Tom Cruise, or … you says its so? Are you saying, if he makes the wrong choice – then he’s going to hell?

If you are saying that Brian’s belief in Jesus (or Buda, Mohammad, Jo Smith or whoever he decides) is just as valid and correct as your intellectual decision to follow Jesus – then what is it?… what makes you believe? that’s where the rubber hits the road and I think this post is a bit of a smokescreen – because im not sure you sat down objectively, thought about this stuff then said… ok on the balance or probabilities Jesus rose from the dead. How did you (and Brian) come to believe?