A Resurrection?

After a recent discussion with my wife about the authenticity of the resurrection, I decided that the soapbox I so often stood upon needed to be committed to writing.  So I went in search of one of the apologist articles on the “evidence” and “proof” of the resurrection.  They usually provide the same information.  I found one by Josh McDowell and I will now analyze it piece by piece.[1]

The first thing McDowell must do is prove the veracity of the New Testament because there is no non-biblical record of any event written in the gospels that directly pertains to the specifics of Jesus christ.  In other words, no third-party source confirms the birth, miracles, death, or resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. So McDowell takes the two usual tacks, the first is stating that the Disciples would have been alive to confirm or deny the stories and the second is quoting various Christian college professors with lofty titles that state emphatically, and entirely without providing evidence, that the gospels were written by a certain year (the closer to Christ’s death the better) and that we should all just believe the gospels because they are true.

I will address the second tack first.  The “scholars” that are quoted are almost always Christians.  They already believe the Bible to be true and thus cannot be trusted because they will believe because they want to believe.  Non-Christian scholars that have come to the opposite conclusion are never quoted by apologists, and if they are, the quote is often out of context.  The best verifier of something is a skeptic.  So the apologists often quote someone who spent many years trying to find fault with some specific aspect of one of the gospel writers; after failing in their attempts, they become Christians.  Just because we can verify the secular facts from the gospels, doesn’t prove the supernatural facts and the supernatural facts are the big issue.  Just because XYZ gospel writer got something right about the geographic location in which he lived doesn’t mean he was telling the truth about Jesus of Nazareth rising from the dead and being the savior of mankind.  I will come back to the first tack in a moment.

McDowell presents the following “facts” to support the resurrection: 1) Broken Roman Seal, 2) Empty Tomb, 3) Large Stone Moved, 4) Roman Guard Goes AWOL, 5) Graveclothes Tell a Tale, and 6) Jesus’ Appearances Confirmed.  For the record, NONE of these “facts” is confirmed in any other historical document.  No other historian confirms any of this.  No non-biblical eyewitness has anything to say about this.  ONLY the Bible mentions these things.  We don’t even know who wrote the gospels.  Apologists emphatically point to tradition stating that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels because it weakens the validity of the Bible if they did not.  The truth is NO ONE knows who wrote the gospels.  It could have been eyewitnesses or it could have been lunatics in an ancient psych-ward.  Most of these “facts” about the empty tomb would have been wiped out in 70 C.E. when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.[2]  This brings us to the first tack I mentioned in the above paragraph.  It is interesting that the quote McDowell uses by William F. Albright says that all books of the New Testament should be dated before 80 C.E., which is 10 years after the destruction of Jerusalem and long enough for the stories to get a little muddled, which is apparent in the disagreements in the gospels.

McDowell appeals to witnesses.  He cites Paul’s mention of 500 witnesses in 1 Corinthians.  Paul most likely believed in a spiritual resurrection.[3]  If Paul and these 500 people believed in a spiritual resurrection, then they could have believed whatever they wanted.  Paul’s own vision presented in Acts is of a spiritual being, not a physical one.  We also have no record of anything written by these 500 people.  How do we know Paul didn’t make them up?  Paul doesn’t name them.  So how would the readers of 1 Corinthians find and question these people?  It seems a shaky case to build a religion on.  In a weak attempt to sew up the witness argument, McDowell appeals to hostile witnesses.  Again, the bible ALONE tells of hostile witnesses.  McDowell goes so far as to call Paul a hostile witness; Paul is most definitely not a hostile witness.  The man had a vision and converted to another religion.  We now call people like that “crazy.”  I’m not saying that to be cynical; I’m just putting it in present context.

McDowell tosses a bone to naturalistic explanations like the disciples arriving at the wrong tomb, the visions being hallucinations, the possibility that Jesus just passed out on the cross, and the possibility that the body was stolen.  The wrong tomb argument assumes it all actually happened, and since history confirms that the gospels were written post 70 C.E.[4], there was no one and no location to confirm or deny.  As we have a description of Paul’s hallucination in Acts, why is that explanation so unlikely?  Jesus not dying and the stolen body both also ignore the fact that the gospels were written after Jerusalem was destroyed, thus the facts could no longer be confirmed.  Both arguments assume the gospel’s version of events is true despite the lack of third party historical evidence.

His nail in the coffin point is that the disciple’s lives were real proof.  The only disciple that we have record of doing much of anything after Jesus’ death is Paul, even that all comes from the bible itself, and Paul never met Jesus face to face, only in a vision.  McDowell appeals to the martyrs and those that were persecuted.  There are people all over the world and all throughout history that have been persecuted and martyred for various religions, why is Christianity any different?  909 people willfully committed suicide with Jim Jones in 1978, and they had their leader right in front of them.[5]  A leader that coerced them with fear, the same way Jesus and the Christians did.  “Follow us or you’ll suffer a horrible fate after you’re dead.”  It’s time human beings rejected such emotional garbage outright.  Jesus never rose from the dead; he might not have even existed.  It’s time we stopped wasting our lives living for a mythical spirit being and started being true to ourselves and our own dreams.

“The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.” –Benjamin Franklin

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man [...or god?…], nor ask another man to live for mine.”  — Ayn Rand, John Galt’s Oath from “Atlas Shrugged”

[1] http://leaderu.com/everystudent/easter/articles/josh2.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70)
[3] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/3.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#Date
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

Death to the gods

I was a bit nuts when I wrote this one.  Please bear with the colonial English…

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Each man is an island, a unique construct suspended in a world that exists for his pleasure.  Man is not the slave of anything or anyone.  It is self-evident that all men are equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights.  We humans have dumped that principle in favor of a superstitious dependence on a modern mythology.  Thomas Jefferson said, “I have sworn … eternal hostility against every from of tyranny over the mind of man.”  This should be the motivation of every person on earth, but instead we bow before our gods.  We come to the priests of our faith rarely, instead relying on a hope that their benevolence will fall rather than their wrath.  When something of great importance arises the gods speak esoteric phrases designed to give us an illusion of free will.  We cry and wail at the horrible penalties the gods place upon us and our children, but in the end we seem to believe that they are gods and that they have a right to punish us, even if that punishment is undeserved and the punisher flawed and mortal.  They rape, pillage, plunder, and destroy while we argue over the worthless minutiae of the god-sect to which we adhere.  We claim that we are mere victims of fate, as their oracles have told us.  We hear the words of the oracles and we act in accordance.  Divine utterances are to be revered and unquestioned, no matter how contradictory and ludicrous.  We live our lives as if the gods and their deeds do not matter, or as if we are powerless against them.  We accept their divine right and continue on with the meaningless existence they dole out to us.

Wake up Humanity!  You have been tricked!  The gods are not gods at all, but mere mortals.  Weak, flawed, and evil mortals whose ultimate goal is to strengthen the divine charade they have erected over us in order to keep us as slaves!  I swear eternal hostility against this mental tyranny!  Evil men are evil men are evil men.  There is no lesser or greater.  They become pure evil as they pursue the basest evil of all: tyranny.  We fall and bow to their rituals.  We beg and plead for their favor, when the favor is ours!  We bestow rights and privileges upon them, NOT they upon us!

Wake up Humanity!  Lets us throw the gods from their thrones!  Let us take action, not as serfs and vassals of a feudal futility, but as humans!  WE ARE, and we have the right to be as we so chose!  If there is any “divine” right, it rests equally upon every man, woman and child upon this earth.  No man has the authority, or the right to enslave another.  No man, so long as he harms no other, is deserving of any corporate penalty for his actions, other than that which nature would place upon him.  NO KING, NO RULER, NO LEADER, NO LEGISLATOR, NO PRESIDENT, and NO CONGRESSMAN deserves to even exist, as their only purpose is to enslave.

The gods are dead, for they were not gods to begin with.  Let us treat them as the vile and contemptuous criminals they are.  There is no hope in governments.  There is no freedom in government.  Withdraw your consent and refuse to obey their edicts.

Party Politics: The False Dilemma

I’ve been published!  I wrote an article that has been published on the Digital Bits Skeptic site.

Take a look:
http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/11/30/party-politics-and-the-false-dilemma-logical-fallacy/

Free to be Happy

Happiness is not denying oneself.  It is not found in serving unknown gods, whose man-made systems of immorality demand self-sacrifice in order to achieve an esoteric reward.  Happiness is loving yourself.  Loving yourself enough to pursue your own hopes and dreams.  It’s loving yourself enough to stop worrying about other people and working as hard as you can to achieve your greatest hopes and dreams.  Do you want to build the first faster-than-light capable space ship?  Then ignore the nay-sayers whose abject failure will be amplified by your success.  Pursue your dreams, and when your parents, friends, and enemies tell you that you can’t, then laugh in their faces!  Only when you love yourself despite their opinions can you ever truly be happy.  Only when you accept your success and learn from your failures can you be happy.  Stop apologizing for success in an attempt to not offend the failures.  Stop beating yourself up over failure instead of realizing your humanity and using failure as a springboard for personal greatness.  Question if your failure is even a failure at all.  Religions and bizarre moral codes dominate our lives and seek to enslave us to false guilt.  There is a scene in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where a looter (a person who has failed because of incompetence and stupidity and thus hates the successful, because it reminds them of their own failure, and tries to steal from the successful on the basis of “need” which is in reality an excuse to try to hurt successful people) tells one of the successful characters that control is not achieved by individual liberty.  It is achieved by making huge numbers of mutually exclusive rules that no one can possibly follow and then damning everyone who breaks even the tiniest point.  You gain control by using the individuals own self-damnation to blackmail them into doing what you want.  That is religion to the letter.  The only person that is free of this type of control is the one who refuses to inflict the suffering of guilt upon themselves for things that are not wrong in the first place.  With that in mind, don’t make mindlessly stupid choices either.  Use your mind, your reason, and the facts to choose the correct path to follow.  Don’t just jump into things without thinking.  And when you make mistakes, use them to climb higher and higher on the ladder of personal success.

“I thought that the world was mine, and those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength.  I could not understand why I kept losing every battle.  I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own.  While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered the realm of my mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality.” — Hank Rearden Atlas Shrugged

Is There Virtue in Selfishness?

The famous author and founder of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, wrote a book called “The Virtue of Selfishness.” I have heard many a Marxist stand aghast at this concept. They recoil in horror at the thought of there being virtue in selfishness. They immediately call to mind images of spoiled brats going around stealing, killing, and beating people to get their way. They picture chaos. Marxist commentators (that usually hide behind the title of Socialist) pound this soapbox day in and day out. The only problem is that it is obvious from their actions that they have never read Ayn Rand’s books or, if they have, their minds were made up before they started reading them. I have read Rand’s Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and I would like to attempt to correct the misperception of the ideas presented.

Rand redefines the terms selfishness and selflessness. Selflessness is living a life of constant self-denial. This is not self-discipline or self-control. This is giving up on one’s ultimate dreams for someone else. Like someone that wants to be a musician, but whose parents push them into becoming a computer programmer. That person can never be happy, because they have given up happiness for others. Selflessness is also wanting something and trying to use things like legislation and lawsuits to steal it from someone else because you feel you “deserve” it, when in reality you are simply lazy and won’t work for what you want.

Selfishness is pursuing one’s own happiness without infringing on the rights of others. It means living by your own strengths and not leeching strength from others. It is the opposite of selflessness. There is room for altruism by choice, but in an Objectivist world, there is little need for it. All individuals wish to succeed based upon their own efforts. Individuals seek to constantly learn and improve themselves, so as they make errors that keep them poor and unsuccessful, they self-correct with logic and reason in order to improve and overcome their circumstances.  Selfish altruism bases itself on value. Giving to persons that you know will grow and profit from the gift because you chose to do so is selfish altruism. Giving to the lazy and incompetent or because of some ridiculous sense of obligation is wasteful.

On the subject of the use of force in order to acquire, it is known and stated throughout Rand’s works that individual freedom and pursuit of happiness does not entitle one to the use of force to acquire happiness. On the contrary, Rand believed that using force to acquire would actually bring unhappiness.  Man’s happiness can be achieved by pursuing his rational goals to their ultimate end. Life is not meant to be lived under the burdens of guilt and obligation. Living for others and denying yourself causes personal suffering, including feelings of guilt and obligation. Rand held that suffering was evil and not a virtue. We get one chance to live our lives, choosing a path of pain in order to achieve some mythical “higher level” that our minds cannot perceive or know is a useless endeavor and leads to wasted lives.

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”  –John Galt Atlas Shrugged