Friendly outgoing eclectic agnostic seeks one gram of soul
I’ve you’ve never come across the site Passive-Aggressive Notes, you’ve been missing out. It, along with the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks always manage to keep me entertained.
One of their recent posts involved a few lovely Christian themed notes, asking Where Would Jesus Park?
Even though I was never really a Christian (although I looked into it seriously for a year or so), I had always assumed that Jesus was, most likely, a real person. There’s a common argument1 which goes something like this:
“Either Jesus was crazy, or what he said must have been true. There’s no evidence he was crazy, therefore he must be the son of God”. Sure, there are plenty of other responses to this argument, but I think the two simplest ones are:
I still maintain that if Jesus did actually exist, he would be quite unhappy about how his teachings have been butchered and interpreted today. So in some sense, I still believe the first option is quite likely. I had not, however (until recently) actually seriously considered the possibility that Jesus didn’t actually exist.
The bible talks about people we know existed, right? Various Kings and so forth? So, it’s fair to assume that Jesus also existed? Given that Jesus is such a central part of the Christian mythology, Christianity would fall if it could be demonstrated that Jesus was simply a myth, right (please, correct me if I’m wrong)? Well, this might just be true!
I first came across these two YouTube videos2 a while back, and it made me realise that, if true, it would be an amazing coincidence if he actually existed (of course, perhaps that was God’s plan to make Jesus even more difficult to believe, thus requiring more faith). Dionysus (one of the figures discussed in the videos) was supposedly born of a virgin, fathered by the king of heaven, turned water into wine, died and resurrected. Sound familiar? There are, apparently, many other mythical figures who have extraordinarily similar stories - all of which predate Jesus.
There seem to be many others out there who claim similar things, and while there is some criticism of some of these claims, there are, undoubtedly some parts of the Jesus story which were “borrowed” from earlier myths.
I plan to investigate this further, as I don’t believe it’s quite as clear as is suggested, but I wonder - how much of Jesus’ life has to be true for Christianity to remain?
I’ve been away this weekend, and haven’t got around to writing a proper post, so I’ll leave you with a joke instead.
Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.
Finally fed up, God said, “THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.”
So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.
They moused.
They faxed.
They e-mailed.
They e-mailed with attachments.
They downloaded.
They did spreadsheets!
They wrote reports.
They created labels and cards.
They created charts and graphs.
They did some genealogy reports.
They did every job known to man.
Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell
Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.
Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.
Jesus just sighed.
Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming:
“It’s gone! It’s all GONE! “I lost everything when the power went out!”
Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.
Satan observed this and became irate.
“Wait!” he screamed. “That’s not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?”
God just shrugged and said,
JESUS SAVES
Last week, I mentioned that science could be a way to “religious experience”, and I discussed in one of my earliest posts (Religious Eclecticism) the idea that all religions could be based on some element of truth. Don’t misunderstand me, I believe whatever truth they may be based on has been utterly distorted, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to be found.
I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth - they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”1.
Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:
Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.2
I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).
If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…
Here are some of the sites I’ve been looking at recently, that I wanted to share:
I thought Jesus and Mo was a perfect combination to highlight the illogical nature of religion, but I was wrong - who could pick apart Christianity better than Socrates?
It’s a long read, but it seems to sum up Christianity quite well. A small snippet to tempt you:
Socrates: If God created man’s eyes, legs and mind, he also created man’s desires; all his desires, even his desire for knowledge and sex. Why did man sin?
Jesus: He sinned because of his weaknesses and his evil nature.
Socrates: Who created man’s nature?
Jesus: God.
Socrates: It seems to me that you Lord God has merely created man to watch him suffer. This business of Satan, the Garden of Eden and free will is merely a facade. God merely wanted an excuse to harass, persecute, torment and oppress mankind. If an all-powerful and all-knowing being creates everything, and allows his creations to react in a certain way, he actually intended them to act in that way and is solely responsible for the results.
Link: Socrates Meets Jesus
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray
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