One of their recent posts involved a few lovely Christian themed notes, asking Where Would Jesus Park?

Check them out…

1. Jesus was misquoted, or misconstrued
2. Jesus never actually existed

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?

1. I think it might have originally been by C. S. Lewis, although I could be wrong
2. Both videos are short clips from Zeitgeist – The Movie, available in its entirety via BitTorrent (legally!), streamed via Google Video, or for order on DVD

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

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…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way.
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God

• Prince Of Peace – God Of War Gets First Review And A Release Date – A film by John Campea (of The Movie Blog) about Christianity and the war in Iraq. The first five minutes are available in the post.
• Ten reasons why beer is better than Jesus – and #11. Beer tastes better…
• The Ultimate Spoiler… – Don’t click this link if you don’t like finding out how the book ends (but… come on, you know you want to click it)
• The Primate Diaries: Today’s Math Lesson – The differences between fundamentalists and moderate believers and atheists.
• Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica instrument of debaptism – The “Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica” (that document you can use to ask to be “debaptised” from the Catholic Church – NOW IN ENGLISH!
• BibleMap.org – Want to know where all those places the bible talks about actually ARE? Look no further…

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

Essentially, in matters for which we are unable to understand and evaluate the facts for ourselves, we try to evaluate the trustworthiness of the source.

Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role in mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim’s source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it.¹

It seems only natural, and a perfectly valid way of making up your opinions about things. The problem occurs when we don’t know what sources to trust.

(Scientific claims) clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities.²

If our own political leaders (Well, thankfully not my political leaders to the same degree – although he did seem a little iffy on global warming for quite a while) show an inherent distrust of science, and people are brought up to believe the church is a reputable source of scientific knowledge, is it any wonder that there’s so much distrust of science?

I’ve read suggestions by scientists that claim that it’s simply not worth arguing with creationists in public forums because those who listen to the creationists already distrust science, and nothing they say (no matter how rational) will convert them. Maybe we need to start earlier? I read a post the other day (dammed³ if I could find it again – help me out if you know what I’m talking about) that suggested the idea of creating a textbook for use in school which rationally outlined the creationist vs. evolution debate in an easy-to-understand yet scientifically accurate way. Maybe if we can help establish that scientists are the ones who should be trusted when it comes to scientific matters⁴, and not politicians or the church.

(Via A Whore in the Temple of Reason)

1. Bloom, Paul & Weisberg, Deena S. (2007) Why Do Some People Resist Science?
2. Bloom, Paul & Weisberg, Deena S. (2007) Why Do Some People Resist Science?
3. Figuratively, of course
4. I can’t believe this actually needs to be said!