Mythicism and the Public Jesus of History

“Arguments for the nonexistence of the Jesus of history stumble over the public nature of much of the primary evidence. Jesus was observed by crowds of people, by friends and foes alike. The strongest evidence for the existence of Jesus is found in Paul’s letters to the Christians of Corinth and Galatia. In these letters, whose authenticity no one doubts, Paul describes his firsthand—and very public—encounters with two of Jesus’ original disciples, Peter and John, and with James, the brother of Jesus. Attempts to explain away this James as someone other than the brother of Jesus reveal the desperation of the mythicist approach to the evidence. It is important to remember that critics of early Christianity never doubted the existence of Jesus—they disputed His identity and significance. Modern critics should follow their lead.”

“The success of science sometimes leads people to think that because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe, then we can safely conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place. This reasoning commits a logical error in that it confuses mechanism and agency. Consider a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that someone who was seeing one for the first time and who knew no science might imagine that there is a god (Mr. Ford) inside the engine, making it go. Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take apart the engine, he would discover that there is no Mr. Ford inside it. He would also see that he did not need to introduce Mr. Ford as an explanation for its working; his grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be enough to do that. However, if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of how the engine worked made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr. Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false. Had there never been a Mr. Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand. It is equally mistaken to suppose that our scientific understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds it.” — John Lennox (from, Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend)

This is one of several great quotes here:

12 Apologetics Quotes: Christianity, Critical Thinking, and the Life of the Mind

“…And no religion too-hoo…”

Imagine the world that our atheist friends yearn for, the one they say is inevitably on its way because religion is going out of style like spats, and we have evolved past the need for it. Most everyone is a non-believer in religion, organized faith, the supernatural, or anything outside the materialist box.

Imagine the consensus is non-faith. Everyone agrees that there’s no God up in the sky, the universe randomly appeared out of nothing, and we human beings create our own moral consensus.

Freethinkers rejoice. We don’t talk about the fact that there’s no God anymore because it’s no longer a debate. It’s not even an issue.

Everybody thinks with crystal-clear lucidity. Insanity, gone. Reason for conflict or war, gone. Harmony and peace prevail because there’s no longer any spiritual conviction making people care about righteousness or goodness. Nobody’s invested in anything enough to have serious disagreement.

Cultural atheism is the societal religion. We have thrown off the shackles and taken off the blinders. Finally we can think freely.

Do we imagine that all non-believers are true non-believers?

Sure, there are some committed atheists who understand why they are atheists. They are devoted to the maintenance of societal consensus. Defenders of the truth. They teach. They disciple. Because it’s important.

Then, there are the unreflecting atheists who were born into their non-faith. They don’t think about it. They say the right things and they believe them because it’s what they’ve always been taught. Everybody thinks these things. They are cultural atheists who swim in the water they’re immersed in. Indeed there are many who call themselves atheist, but don’t understand their own worldview. They are nominal atheists without any real interest in the cause.

What do you think the ratio would be? And wouldn’t that be a lot like the world now, under the tyranny of superstitious religion?

And might there not be skeptics in the freethinking world? Heretics? One of the things acknowledged by that bygone antique, the Bible, is that all human beings are fundamentally self-seeking and contrary. There will be people who perversely insist that there is a God, He wrote us a book, He sent His only Son to earth as a man…even if they don’t mean it.

Here’s one illustration of the fact that non-belief can be as committed as belief:

In largely Muslim Pakistan, a taboo atheist subculture endures

The criticisms of the faithful by atheists include:

Why do millions of Christian people disagree? Why are there multiple denominations? Differences in doctrinal interpretation must mean that all doctrine is false. The conclusion is not at all logical. Because we’re not robots but freely-thinking humans, we experience our own separate journeys of learning the faith. If we were all mindless followers, wouldn’t our stories be nearly the same?

Or maybe there is that divide between believers: the vast numbers of nominal and the comparitively few committed believers. The news that anti-faith proponents can’t seem to digest: most people who might call themselves religious are nominal; the numbers of believers who have really invested, examined and intentionally adopted  are relatively few.

The Bible predicts that the world would be just so. The way is narrow, and few enter therein. Those who Christ will address with, “I never knew you” may not be speaking with authority or proper knowledge when they discuss their experience of the faith. Atheist apologists usually prefer to argue with the low-hanging fruit.

And if the current discourse of atheists on social media or mass media is any indication, that utopia where everyone goes about their lives relieved of the burden to acknowledge a god, free to finally act and think without the religious detour, finally able to arrive at some kind of real reasonable, natural stasis, will never happen. Because no atheist I have ever encountered seems able to dismiss God from his thoughts for a single second. The typical atheist is more invested in his awareness of the existence of God than most Christian believers I know.

When the atheist paradise arrives, the world may be filled with heretics and nominal atheists. And the few true believers will have the onerous task to keep orthodoxy alive.

For the record I hate that vapid song Imagine.

This excellent post by Empires and Mangers explains the difficulties of acknowledging evil without acknowledging God.

The Shape Of Reality: Identifying Evil

Is Atheism a Delusion?

 ^{Do unto other as you would have them do unto you.}

The first thing to understand about the Golden Rule is that God invented it. Which god?  The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, The Almighty, The Father in the Trinity which also includes the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ.  The God whom Jews and Christians worship.

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12

I know I have some potential readers who will take issue with this specific God’s authorship, citing holy writings from other faiths which predate the Tanakh and certainly the New Testament. No matter. That is moot.

The One True God wove His perfect ethic into the fabric of the universe. The true moral law is in every facet of creation. Many seekers the world over from many faiths or none have discovered it. But terminally self-oriented human beings will always twist and bend this perfect treasure, and their moral eurekas will be handed down agendized and neutered to fit their cultural uniforms.

The One God poured His own perfect nature into the universe He created ex nihilo. It cannot but reflect His perfect goodness. There is one God, and one moral ethic.

Detractors like to assign other authorships to righteous morality but no one has found an alternative rubric, or a better one. All other ethical systems are remarkably similar to this one, and always <_.

This moral meme is found the world over because it is fundamental to any ethical system. It can be found everywhere. Indeed the fact that this law is ubiquitous lends validity to its being the genesis of ethical formation.

“That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”

“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” — Confucius

If people regarded other people’s families in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own family to attack that of another? For one would do for others as one would do for oneself.” — Mozi

“Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.”

The true moral ethic is found in us.

For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. ¹⁴ (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. ¹⁵ They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)

There is no one who does not know that there is right and wrong. That’s easy to demonstrate. We may not all agree on the details, and we may rationalize our own preferences and favorite sins into the good category, but we all run up against items that we’re indignant about when we see them. Even an existentialist, even a nihilist, declares objectively wrong or unjust his possession taken from him. Even a morally relativist atheist is quick to condemn evil when he ascribes it to the Judaeo-Christian God.

The second thing we all know is that there is some non-subjective moral mean. If right and wrong were truly relative, that would mean that nothing was truly wrong, and that nothing was truly right. Everyone still recognizes some acts as morally atrocious and has an expectation that everyone should agree.

You may argue endlessly without agreement with an atheist about the origin of an objective moral standard. He will one moment deny that fixed morals exist, and the next moment proudly declare his objective repugnance at some perceived injustice of which religion is guilty. In asserting a subjective origin such as cultural consensus, yet asserting that there are objective morals which derive from a subjective source, the only thing he proves with certainty is that his own personal morals are totally subjective, and that he believes in spite of himself in an objective morality.

The Golden Rule is the right reason for all righteous behavior. The implications of the Golden Rule are endless and everywhere.

If I am to treat every person with the treatment I desire for myself, it must mean that there is an objective measure which applies to all human beings (me and others= all). The Golden Rule implies that there is an overarching code that all should recognize and obey. That leaves no room at all for relativism.

It must mean that it is objectively right that everyone else ought to receive the best treatment which I want for myself. But what imposes those objective “oughts‘?

A Code Originator, a Golden Rule Author, is inescapable. No impersonal process is capable of requiring accountability.

It follows that each person, according to that measure, is of equal value, and that each and every person is entitled to equal and just treatment. When we acknowledge that every single person is equal in value, and equally entitled to rights which God has given, all lawful and kind and just behavior is then is the only response.

As soon as you allow that some persons may have more value than others, or that some persons must have greater rights than others, tragedy and injustice follow as night follows day.

As soon as you allow, for instance, that a tiny human in a womb may be negated and erased, because her mother’s perceived rights may be diminished; as soon as you pit one person’s rights against the other’s, which in itself is anathema to the honoring of a Golden Rule; you have opened the door and invited inside injustice, lawlessness, brutality, elitism, and oppression. The right of some to kill, the necessity of others to die.