Category: Religion

Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Interrupted is filled with fascinating insights into the Biblical scriptures. Today it seems appropriate to touch on some of his notes about the resurrection of Jesus.

Ehrman points out, “[W]e don’t have the originals of any of these Gospels, only copies made later, in most instances many centuries later. These copies all differ from one another, very often in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection” (pages 47-48).

The scholarly consensus, Ehrman notes, is that “the final twelve versus of Mark’s Gospel are not original to Mark’s Gospel but were added by a scribe in a later generation” (page 48). This is particularly interesting given that Mark was the primary source for Matthew and Luke.

Because the Gospels draw on the same narratives, they “agree that on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found it empty. But on virtually every detail they disagree” (page 48).

For instance, who went to the tomb? After he rises from the dead, to whom does Jesus appear, and what does he say?

For instance, in Mark Jesus tells “Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome” to “tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee” (16:7). In Luke, Jesus says, “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise” (24:6-7). Ehrman points out that Luke also authored Acts, which states that Jesus charged his disciples “not to depart from Jerusalem” (1:4). (See Ehrman page 49 for commentary on this point.)

Of course many will see this as missing the forest for the trees: is not the central narrative the resurrection, and the rest detail? Perhaps, but the details do matter when evaluating the nature of the overall narrative. (Obviously, looking at this resurrection story from the perspective of its canonized representatives hardly exhausts the types of criticism to which it may be subjected.)

Though it strays from the resurrection narrative, another interesting point that Ehrman makes is that Matthew had an odd way of fulfilling Old Testament prophesies (see page 50).

Zechariah 9:9 says: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! [Note the repetitive verse.] Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt and the foal of an ass.” (I’m using a different translation than Ehrman uses.)

The last part of the line modifies the first instance of “ass” or donkey. “But Matthew evidently did not understand this poetic convention in this place,” Ehrman notes; thus Matthew writes, “The disciples… brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon” (21:6-7).

I have no doubt that, in the Gospels, Jesus fulfills (select and vague) Old Testament prophesies, for the Gospels were written precisely to make him do so.

But the narrative of Jesus’s resurrection is itself only a tree in the broader forest of spring-time life-generation myths. It is a lovely, sunny day, the earth (in my part of the world) is returning to summer life, and it’s time to celebrate plants, fertility, bunnies, eggs, and long life!

When I watched the first few seconds of this video some weeks ago, I didn’t appreciate it. But now that I’ve watched it completely through…

Who was Soraya M.? She was a young woman murdered by Islamist thugs in 1986. She is every woman who continues to suffer under Islamist tyranny around the world.

Most of the horror stories we never hear about. One story has been made into a film, The Stoning of Soraya M. I am not looking forward to watching it. But watch it I must.

[September 14, 2014 Update: The video in question is no longer available at YouTube.]

Thanks to Flibbert, I ran across two bizarrely interesting videos of religious worship.

In the first, a toddler walks around the stage spouting impassioned nonsense in the style of an old-time country sermon.

In the second, Marjoe Gortner continues to pretend to be a faith healer for a time even after he has become convinced that it’s all nonsense.

One message to take from this is that some people are just goofy. They do things that make no sense. This is true whether they package their nonsense in religion or something else.

However, there is an especial tendency with religion, grounded as it is in faith, to promote emotionalist, cathartic practices quite separated from any understanding of reality. While religion at its best is quite sophisticated and intellectual, religion’s popular manifestations seem to lean toward the other variety.

[September 14, 2014 Update: The videos in question are no longer available.]

A large portion of articles from the conservative Town Hall attempt to prove the existence of God or slam atheism. (This is yet another example of how the conservative movement is captured by the religious right.) A recent example is Ben Shapiro’s “Why Atheism Is Morally Bankrupt.”

Here is Shapiro’s argument:

[W]ithout God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.

Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions — the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power — a spark of the supernatural. As philosopher Rene Descartes, put it, Although I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined [my soul] is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body and can exist without it. [A direct quote?]

Gilbert Pyle, the atheistic philosopher, derogatorily labeled the idea of soul/body dualism, the ghost in the machine. Nonetheless, our entire legal and moral system is based on the ghost in the machine — the presupposition that we can choose to do otherwise. …

According to atheists, human beings are intensely complex machines. Our actions are determined by our genetics and our environment.

Shapiro’s claim about atheists is obviously false. Many atheists reject determinism.

But notice the basic form of Shapiro’s argument: “I cannot explain X as part of the natural world, therefore God exists.” This argument has been repeated in many forms over the centuries. “I cannot explain [lightning, weather, causal laws, gravity, the origin of species, morality, free will] as part of the natural word, therefore God exists.”

But an inability to explain something does not justify the move to Making Stuff Up. Lack of knowledge about the natural world does not demonstrate the existence of a supernatural world.

I do not pretend to have the final answer to free will. (I don’t pretend to have the final answer to gravity or many other things, either.) Yet it is obviously the case that an account of free will need not invoke God, because two major theories of free will avoid doing so. Objectivists such as Leonard Peikoff argue that mechanistic causation does not exhaust the nature of causation, and that certain things in the universe — people with rational consciousness — are capable of self-causation in important ways. Others, including Daniel Dennett, make a case for compatibilism, the view that free will operates within a deterministic world. I hope to return to this issue squarely within the next couple years.

The unassailable fundamental is that we do have free will. We obviously can “choose to do otherwise.” We can observe the phenomenon of choice within ourselves. The fact that science cannot explain free will with finality does not disprove free will any more than a lack of understanding about gravity allows us to float freely above the earth with no upward force. The point of science is to explain aspects of the natural world, not rationalize away their existence.

Shapiro claims that atheists cannot explain free will in the context of natural law. His solution? Conjure a God not bound by natural law. He counts his ignorance as his proof: we don’t understand something, therefore, God. Yet even within that rationalistic framework Christians have struggled to explain free will. Many influential Christians were determinists. Indeed, Christianity is driven to its own form of compatibilism: God must simultaneously have perfect knowledge — including a perfect awareness of the future — and grant humans free will. Neat trick. The upshot is that Christians reject compatibilism based on a competing theory of compatibilism. But the absurdities of the supernaturalist framework are secondary: the main point is that there’s no reason to accept a supernaturalist framework, and the attempt inherently defies reason.

In his fourth essay criticizing Dinesh D’Souza, Greg Perkins notes that D’Souza accuses atheists of rebelling against moral rules. After summarizing why that’s not the case for atheists who know what they’re talking about, Perkins adds:

[T]he religionists are themselves guilty of the sin of moral subjectivism. The essence of subjectivism is acting on whim — wishing, assuming, feeling, or declaring that facts will align themselves with thoughts and lives. Of course, this gets it exactly backwards: thoughts and lives must align themselves with the facts because facts are absolutes to be discovered, not declared. Merely hoping or asserting something is good doesn’t make it so, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the whim of a lone subjectivist deciding what is good or bad, the whim of an entire civilization voting on it, or the whim of a “supernatural” mind decreeing it. So the religious who claim to have an absolute morality are really only subjectivists of a supernatural stripe. The trouble for them is that their sort of subjectivism is just as false as any other: God telling Abraham that it is good to slay his innocent son Isaac doesn’t make it good. His ordering the enslavement of entire peoples in the Old Testament doesn’t make that good.

While Perkins only hints at the full case behind his arguments, he starts down the right track and offers a useful reading list.

There is a point that Perkins doesn’t make: D’Souza is psychologizing. He is postulating some psychological rebellion that, in most cases, simply does not exist. (Perkins correctly claims that many atheists resort to the theory of subjectivism, but that’s a very different charge.) Thus, D’Souza’s argument on this point is not only wrong but ad hominem.