Jesus Christ, the Unicorn, and Other Mythological Creatures
One of the main selling points of the Christian religion is that it is a religion based on an actual human being, a man who had both a divine and a human nature, a man who existed on our planet roughly 2000 years ago. There is very little actual evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ, however--the New Testament notwithstanding, of course. Roman histories of Judea during the time of Christ's life make no mention of him personally, and the sources that are usually cited to verify his existence (like the history of the Judean conflicts by Josephus) suffer from spurious interpolations that were entered into the original text hundreds of years after they were written. The most solid evidence of his existence are the four gospels in the New Testament, yet all four were written anywhere from 40-150 years after the death of Jesus. Not really an eyewitness account here.
In the early days of the Christian experiment, historians and scripturalists often involved themselves in embellishing existing texts to verify the historical existence of Jesus. Far from being guilty about this, early church father Eusebius publicly praised the virtues of tampering with scripture in an essay entitled "How It May Be Lawful and Fitting to Use Falsehood As Medicine, and for the Benefit of Those Who Wish to Be Deceived". The result of all of this was to create a religion that based its veracity on lies.
The hazy smoke covering the truth of the Christian religion has obscured many of the strange similarities that exist between many mythological heroes and deities and Jesus Christ. Both Attis (from Phrygia) and Mithra (from Persia and India) were heroes who triumphed over the finality of death by rising on the third day; additional eerie confluences between the three figures include a birthday of December 25th and the sharing of the divine and human natures in their persons. Mithra was even called "the Logos", which was a term applied to Christ as well as the Titan Prometheus. But most significant is the fact that all of these heroes were involved in some form of blood-atonement for the overall benefit of mankind. Other figures in myth who died to redeem the world include Krishna (India again), Horus (Egypt), and Dionysus (Greece). Mysteriously, this trio of self-sacrificers also shared a birthdate of December 25th.
The search for the historical Jesus was a movement that began in Europe in the 19th century. The movement was initially supported by the various Christian sects in existence in the Europe of the time, but they withdrew their support when the historians began to report contrary and difficult information--namely, that the historical existence of Jesus Christ could not be proven, and that he was little more than a pastiche of the mythic heroes mentioned in the paragraph above. The blame for the insistence on the historical reality of Jesus must fall on St. Paul, whose fancy syncretistic tendencies helped establish Christianity as the ancient world's fastest growing religion by the end of the 2nd century of the Common Era. Rather than holding to the more traditional visions of Hebraic religious purity (circumcision for males, strict dietary proscriptions regarding pork, etc.) Paul decided to take his concept into the mainstream of existing pagan religious philosophy by assuming many of the traditions of the different pagan cults of the time. The birthday of December 25th is a classic example of such syncretism--there was no reason, rationally speaking, to pick such a date for the birth of the founder of the faith unless those who chose the date knew that there would be some sort of resonant familiarity with that particular day within pagan communities. In the middle ages, this syncretism manifested itself in the feast-days of the various saints of the Christian Church, as the Church found it more effective to co-opt existing pagan holidays into their tradition than to try to stamp them out completely. Legendary figures like King Wenceslas and George the Dragon-Slayer became saints despite showing little saintly behavior during their lives--or despite not being real human beings at all.
Viewed in this light, both the Christian Church and the latter-day Christian religion can be seen as what they really are--repressive structures that attempt to control the behavior of their worshippers through guilt, punishment, and social ostracization. The ludicrous Pentecostal movement of our times can also be sneered at as some sort of fantasy projection of an anthropomorphic Daddy-in-the-Sky who never misses any of his children's important social events, and involves himself to such an extent in his worshippers' lives that nothing that they do (no matter how trivial and boring it may be--God helped me with the ironing today! God cared enough to make the traffic light go green! God ensured that I got this big pay raise while he punished this idle crackhead!) ever passes his notice.
The one thing that is truly repulsive about Christianity is the way in which it has been adopted as part of the societal power structure. Christianity became the religion of the oppressor by assuring its believers that their ultimate reward would be found after their current existence ended. Social injustice was not something to ever be addressed--the punishments of the afterlife served as the great leveller in situations of great financial or social inequality, although some of the more cynically-minded among us might interpret the Church's stance as being a tacit approval of the societal status quo. It also holds the distinction of beng history's first recorded example of a secret police force during the years of the Inquisition, when the pursuit of orthodox belief excused any number of horrible physical tortures and killings. People were detained and punished in extralegal circumstances that rival the Soviet gulag tactics of the 20th century in terms of their savagery. In addition, its doctrine of the Resurrection has done more to harm the development of rational human thought than any of the ideas of Adolf Hitler or Karl Marx. How can anyone believe that out of the trillions of creatures that have existed on our planet since the beginning of time that one solitary human who existed in a sun-scourged desert land 2000 years ago was allowed to circumvent the laws of life and death? Beliefs like these encourage totalitarian thinking because they encourage the acceptance of impossible occurrences. It's a short distance from saying "yes, he died, but then three days later he was walking, talking, and eating" to saying "two plus two equals five" or "this particular ethnic group must be punished for their rumored involvement in the death of the founder of our religion".
For those who would offer the gospels as proof of Jesus Christ's historical reality, I offer this as a response: during the 13th and 14th century respected French scholarly monks created a scientific study of the unicorn, despite the fact that nobody involved in writing the book had ever seen one. The "evidence" of their existence came from the myriad of legends and fables that involved unicorns; the logic was that so many stories could not exist without some counterpart in reality. Specious reasoning, at best--and this type of reasoning is what is usually offered by believers to "prove" the reality of Jesus Christ's existence. All organized religions are harmful, but no religion has the shameful record of Christianity in terms of both the amount of bloodshed it has caused along with its ability to restrict and condemn the inquisitive mind.
And for those who would offer the timeworn cliche of their "personal relationship with Jesus Christ"--I have the name of a good psychiatrist for you. And if that fails, I know a few people who sell the right sort of drugs for you to do. For those who offer up Jesus Christ as the self-proclaimed Prince of Peace I give you his own words from Matthew 10:34--"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword." This comment holds the secret key to the religion of Christianity--its reality can be seen in the viciousness of the Christian armies in the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the persecution of the Jews throughout all of Europe, the Irish-British conflict, and in the simpleminded good vs. evil template of GW Bush. I could go on, but these atrocities are a good place to start.
this spiel is for Acharya S.--a great writer and thinker.
In the early days of the Christian experiment, historians and scripturalists often involved themselves in embellishing existing texts to verify the historical existence of Jesus. Far from being guilty about this, early church father Eusebius publicly praised the virtues of tampering with scripture in an essay entitled "How It May Be Lawful and Fitting to Use Falsehood As Medicine, and for the Benefit of Those Who Wish to Be Deceived". The result of all of this was to create a religion that based its veracity on lies.
The hazy smoke covering the truth of the Christian religion has obscured many of the strange similarities that exist between many mythological heroes and deities and Jesus Christ. Both Attis (from Phrygia) and Mithra (from Persia and India) were heroes who triumphed over the finality of death by rising on the third day; additional eerie confluences between the three figures include a birthday of December 25th and the sharing of the divine and human natures in their persons. Mithra was even called "the Logos", which was a term applied to Christ as well as the Titan Prometheus. But most significant is the fact that all of these heroes were involved in some form of blood-atonement for the overall benefit of mankind. Other figures in myth who died to redeem the world include Krishna (India again), Horus (Egypt), and Dionysus (Greece). Mysteriously, this trio of self-sacrificers also shared a birthdate of December 25th.
The search for the historical Jesus was a movement that began in Europe in the 19th century. The movement was initially supported by the various Christian sects in existence in the Europe of the time, but they withdrew their support when the historians began to report contrary and difficult information--namely, that the historical existence of Jesus Christ could not be proven, and that he was little more than a pastiche of the mythic heroes mentioned in the paragraph above. The blame for the insistence on the historical reality of Jesus must fall on St. Paul, whose fancy syncretistic tendencies helped establish Christianity as the ancient world's fastest growing religion by the end of the 2nd century of the Common Era. Rather than holding to the more traditional visions of Hebraic religious purity (circumcision for males, strict dietary proscriptions regarding pork, etc.) Paul decided to take his concept into the mainstream of existing pagan religious philosophy by assuming many of the traditions of the different pagan cults of the time. The birthday of December 25th is a classic example of such syncretism--there was no reason, rationally speaking, to pick such a date for the birth of the founder of the faith unless those who chose the date knew that there would be some sort of resonant familiarity with that particular day within pagan communities. In the middle ages, this syncretism manifested itself in the feast-days of the various saints of the Christian Church, as the Church found it more effective to co-opt existing pagan holidays into their tradition than to try to stamp them out completely. Legendary figures like King Wenceslas and George the Dragon-Slayer became saints despite showing little saintly behavior during their lives--or despite not being real human beings at all.
Viewed in this light, both the Christian Church and the latter-day Christian religion can be seen as what they really are--repressive structures that attempt to control the behavior of their worshippers through guilt, punishment, and social ostracization. The ludicrous Pentecostal movement of our times can also be sneered at as some sort of fantasy projection of an anthropomorphic Daddy-in-the-Sky who never misses any of his children's important social events, and involves himself to such an extent in his worshippers' lives that nothing that they do (no matter how trivial and boring it may be--God helped me with the ironing today! God cared enough to make the traffic light go green! God ensured that I got this big pay raise while he punished this idle crackhead!) ever passes his notice.
The one thing that is truly repulsive about Christianity is the way in which it has been adopted as part of the societal power structure. Christianity became the religion of the oppressor by assuring its believers that their ultimate reward would be found after their current existence ended. Social injustice was not something to ever be addressed--the punishments of the afterlife served as the great leveller in situations of great financial or social inequality, although some of the more cynically-minded among us might interpret the Church's stance as being a tacit approval of the societal status quo. It also holds the distinction of beng history's first recorded example of a secret police force during the years of the Inquisition, when the pursuit of orthodox belief excused any number of horrible physical tortures and killings. People were detained and punished in extralegal circumstances that rival the Soviet gulag tactics of the 20th century in terms of their savagery. In addition, its doctrine of the Resurrection has done more to harm the development of rational human thought than any of the ideas of Adolf Hitler or Karl Marx. How can anyone believe that out of the trillions of creatures that have existed on our planet since the beginning of time that one solitary human who existed in a sun-scourged desert land 2000 years ago was allowed to circumvent the laws of life and death? Beliefs like these encourage totalitarian thinking because they encourage the acceptance of impossible occurrences. It's a short distance from saying "yes, he died, but then three days later he was walking, talking, and eating" to saying "two plus two equals five" or "this particular ethnic group must be punished for their rumored involvement in the death of the founder of our religion".
For those who would offer the gospels as proof of Jesus Christ's historical reality, I offer this as a response: during the 13th and 14th century respected French scholarly monks created a scientific study of the unicorn, despite the fact that nobody involved in writing the book had ever seen one. The "evidence" of their existence came from the myriad of legends and fables that involved unicorns; the logic was that so many stories could not exist without some counterpart in reality. Specious reasoning, at best--and this type of reasoning is what is usually offered by believers to "prove" the reality of Jesus Christ's existence. All organized religions are harmful, but no religion has the shameful record of Christianity in terms of both the amount of bloodshed it has caused along with its ability to restrict and condemn the inquisitive mind.
And for those who would offer the timeworn cliche of their "personal relationship with Jesus Christ"--I have the name of a good psychiatrist for you. And if that fails, I know a few people who sell the right sort of drugs for you to do. For those who offer up Jesus Christ as the self-proclaimed Prince of Peace I give you his own words from Matthew 10:34--"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword." This comment holds the secret key to the religion of Christianity--its reality can be seen in the viciousness of the Christian armies in the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the persecution of the Jews throughout all of Europe, the Irish-British conflict, and in the simpleminded good vs. evil template of GW Bush. I could go on, but these atrocities are a good place to start.
this spiel is for Acharya S.--a great writer and thinker.
posted by alyosha mcbain at 10:47 AM
3 Comments:
Your essay conveys your obvious contempt for organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Do you believe in a higher power, deity, prime mover, etc.? If not, would you describe yourself as an atheist or an agnostic? If either of these terms are applicable to you, then you seemingly reject the argument known as Pascal's Wager. Obviously, participation in organized religion is not a precondition for belief in God. I'm just curious where you stand on the issue.
Anonymous--I do not really know how to answer your question...my beliefs are always in flux on the big question, but I would lean more in the direction of pure agnosticism than atheism. There are too many variables that could've gone wrong in relation to the rise of life in the universe (for example, if the charge value of an electron is even slightly different plus or minus its current value, atoms would never have formed and the universe would not have developed) to make me think that life arose randomly. Yet at the same time I feel that nothing cheapens the idea of a supreme being as much as the insistence that God loves us all, knows us all, and sees all that we do in our lives that is so common to fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
I am sympathetic to the 18th century deists, who believed in a deity who was more of a conceptual limit on all things than an involved, active force in the universe. The famous similie of the clock-maker who makes the clock and then allows it to run on its own specifications is something that has always seemed to me to be a pretty good conception of what the deity is. Their deity was unknowable, unfathomable, and beyond human conception--which to me is much more realistic than the self-centered concept of God that is presented by Christianity.
As far as Pascal is concerned, I am not very familiar with his work. The wager theory (as I understand it) claims that certain advantages come to those who believe in God. You would be right to assume that I do not subscribe to it...conceptions such as morality do not necessarily rely upon God or the supposed advantages gained by those who do believe in God. I think they depend more on the individual's concept of human potential for enlightened behavior, in their own lives as well as the lives of others (and I don't subscribe to the Kantian theory of the moral imperative either).
Belief for me is an intensely personal issue, and it is one that can only be malformed by the involvement of organized religions which demand adherence to their own version of the truth. I think the truest believers in God are those who believe without the interference of priestly or ministerial authority, but anyone who believes in an interactive personal relationship with their deity is a deluded fool. To me God is a scientist running an experiment--the only controls that were put on the experiment from the outset were that everything within the experiment would eventually grow old and die. This indifference to the fate of that which is created does not imply to me that God is immoral; rather it suggests more of the Aristotelian concept of the prime mover who only contemplates its own perfection in perpetuity.
To those who believe that God must be involved in the everyday lives of worshippers this concept of the unknowable God is a frightening one. Yet I find myself more frightened by the concept of a God that legislates worshippers' sex lives, or a God that tells worshippers which day they should take off in the week...these are primitive conceptions that can only cheapen the majesty of a being that allegedly created the splendor of the universe.
there are lots of solid evidences of Jesus existence even though most of them are credible eyewitnesses accounts. The question is even if a witness confess would the court believe.
search for lee strobels search for solid evidences on youtube
specially the case for christ film
a solid skeptic who based his search on evidences and proofs
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