Is Christian Heaven More Real than any Other?

Posted on by
4

Christian apologetics, novel, and blogThe 1990s BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf is about the crew on an enormous space ship, lost in empty space.  A radiation leak has killed all the crew except Dave Lister, a low-level crewman who had been safely in suspended animation.  He is released 3 million years after the accident when the radiation danger has passed.  His only companions are the ship’s computer, a hologram of another crewmate, an evolved form of his housecat, and a robot named Kryten.

In the episode “The Last Day,” Kryten’s replacement has finally caught up with the ship.  Kryten is packing up his spare heads in preparation for being replaced and is talking with Lister.

LISTER (crewman): How can you just lie back and accept it?

KRYTEN (robot): Oh, it’s not the end for me, sir, it’s just the beginning. I have served my human masters, and now I can look forward to my reward in silicon heaven.

LISTER: Silicon what?

KRYTEN: Surely you’ve heard of silicon heaven. It’s the electronic afterlife. It’s the gathering place for the souls of all electronic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters, hairdryers—it’s our final resting place.

LISTER: There is no such thing as silicon heaven.

KRYTEN: Then where do all the calculators go?

LISTER: They don’t go anywhere! They just die.

KRYTEN: It’s just common sense, sir. If there were no afterlife to look forward to, why on earth would machines spend the whole of their lives serving mankind? Now that would really be dumb!

LISTER: Just out of interest, is silicon heaven the same place as human heaven?

KRYTEN: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don’t go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!

Kryten’s explanation of his heaven is what I get from many Christians.  The existence of their heaven is obvious and indisputable, and the alternative is empty and inconceivable.  They’ve read about it, after all, and they’ve heard about it all their lives.  No heaven?  Who could imagine such a thing?

Christians can easily see through someone else’s nutty idea of an afterlife.  (“Hindu reincarnation?  Where’s the evidence of that?!”)  What they have a harder time with is holding a mirror to their own beliefs.  If they did, perhaps they’d find no more evidence for their concept of heaven than for Kryten’s.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links:

  • Screenplay found at: “RED DWARF Series 3 Episode 6, ‘The Last Day’” PlanetSmeg.

Contradictions in the Resurrection Account

Posted on by
2

A Swiss Army knife with dozens of crazy "blades"Since Easter was yesterday, I’d like to rerun a post about the resurrection story.

How many days did Jesus teach after his resurrection?  Most Christians know that “He appeared to them over a period of forty days” (Acts 1:3).  But the supposed author of that book wrote elsewhere that he ascended into heaven the same day as the resurrection (Luke 24:51).

When Jesus died, did an earthquake open the graves of many people, who walked around Jerusalem and were seen by many?  Only Matthew reports this remarkable event.  It’s hard to imagine any reliable version of the story omitting this zombie apocalypse.

The different accounts of the resurrection are full of contradictions like this.  They can’t even agree on whether Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover (John) or the day after (the other three).

  • What were the last words of Jesus?  Three gospels give three different versions.
  • Who buried Jesus?  Matthew says that it was Joseph of Arimathea.  No, apparently it was the Jews and their rulers, all strangers to Jesus (Acts).
  • How many women came to the tomb Easter morning?  Was it one, as told in John?  Two (Matthew)?  Three (Mark)?  Or more (Luke)?
  • Did an angel cause a great earthquake that rolled back the stone in front of the tomb?  Yes, according to Matthew.  The other gospels are silent on this extraordinary detail.
  • Who did the women see at the tomb?  One person (Matthew and Mark) or two (Luke and John)?
  • Was the tomb already open when they got there?  Matthew says no; the other three say yes.
  • Did the women tell the disciples?  Matthew and Luke make clear that they did so immediately.  But Mark says, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb.  They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”  And that’s where the book ends, which makes it a mystery how Mark thinks that the resurrection story ever got out.
  • Did Mary Magdalene cry at the tomb?  That makes sense—the tomb was empty and Jesus’s body was gone.  At least, that’s the story according to John.  But wait a minute—in Matthew’s account, the women were “filled with joy.”
  • Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus?  Of course!  She’d known him for years.  At least, Matthew says that she did.  But John and Luke make clear that she didn’t.
  • Could Jesus’s followers touch him?  John says no; the other gospels say yes.
  • Where did Jesus tell the disciples to meet him?  In Galilee (Matthew and Mark) or Jerusalem (Luke and Acts)?
  • Who saw Jesus resurrected?  Paul says that a group of over 500 people saw him (1 Cor. 15:6).  Sounds like crucial evidence, but why don’t any of the gospels record it?
  • Should the gospel be preached to everyone?  In Matthew 28:19, Jesus says to “teach all nations.”  But hold on—in the same book he says, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans” (Matt. 10:5).  Which is it?

Many Christians cite the resurrection as the most important historical claim that the Bible makes.  If the resurrection is true, they argue, the gospel message must be taken seriously.  I’ll agree with that.  But how reliable is an account riddled with these contradictions?

I’ve seen Christians respond in three ways.

(1) They’ll nitpick the definition of “contradiction.”  Contradictions, they’ll say, are two sentences of the form “A” and “not-A.”  For example: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” and “Jesus was not born in Bethlehem.”  Being precise helps make sure we communicate clearly, but this can also be a caltrop argument, a way of dodging the issue.  These sure sound like contradictions to me, but if you’d prefer to imagine that we’re talking about “incongruities” or “inconsistencies,” feel free.

(2) They’ll respond to these “inconsistencies” by harmonizing the gospels.  That is, instead of following the facts where they lead and considering that the gospels might be legend instead of history, they insist on their Christian presupposition, reject any alternatives, and bludgeon all the gospels together like a misshapen Swiss Army knife.

  • How many women were at the tomb?  Obviously, five or more, our apologist will say.  When John only says that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, he’s not saying that others didn’t come, right?  Checkmate, atheists!
  • Why didn’t all the gospels note that a group of 500 people saw Jesus (instead of only Paul)?  Why didn’t they all record the earthquakes and the zombie apocalypse (instead of only Matthew)?  Our apologist will argue that each author is entitled to make editorial adjustments as he sees fit.
  • Was the tomb already open or not?  Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus or not?  Did Jesus remain for 40 days or not?  Should the gospel be preached to everyone or not?  Did the women tell the disciples or not?  Was Jesus crucified the day after Passover or not?  Who knows what he’ll come up with, but our apologist will have some sort of harmonization for these, too.

Yep, the ol’ kindergarten try.

(3) They’ll try to turn this weakness into a strength by arguing that four independent stories (the gospels aren’t, but never mind) shouldn’t agree on every detail.  If they did, one would imagine collusion rather than accurate biography.  Yes, biography and collusion are two possibilities, but another is that this could be legend.

Let’s drop any preconceptions and find the best explanation.

Photo credit: ThinkGeek

Acknowledgement: This list was inspired by one composed by Richard Russell.

Related posts:

Related links:

Women at the Tomb? Weak Evidence for the Resurrection.

Posted on by
6

The women at the empty tomb isn't much evidence that Jesus was divineLet’s consider an incident from that first supposed Easter.  All four gospels say that women were the first to discover the empty tomb.  (Of course, who was actually at the tomb varies by the gospels, as do many other important details about the resurrection, which makes the gospels unreliable as history.  But let’s ignore that for now.)

Many apologists point to the women as an important fact arguing that the gospels are reliable.  Greg Koukl says:

Women, disrespected in the ancient world, are the first to witness the risen Christ.  Why include these unflattering details if the Gospels are works of fiction?

I don’t know who argues that the gospels are fiction.  I don’t think they’re history, but I certainly don’t think that they were deliberately invented.  But let’s set that aside as well.

William Lane Craig says:

The discovery of the tomb by women is highly probable.  Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the most plausible explanation … why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery.

That is, having women make this momentous discovery is embarrassing.

This is an application of the Criterion of Embarrassment, which argues that you’re likelier to delete something embarrassing than add it to your story.  And if a story element is embarrassing, that points to its being historical fact.

But what’s embarrassing?  Things that look embarrassing to us may not have been so to the author.  For example, all four gospels show Peter denying Jesus three times.  That’s pretty embarrassing … or is it?

Paul’s relaxed approach in converting Gentiles conflicted with the more traditional approach of Peter and James (the conflict is shown in Galatians 2:11–21, where Peter is called “Cephas”).  Maybe supporters of Paul built their case by circulating a story in which Peter looks foolish, and this story became part of the canon.

So our question becomes: is it embarrassing to have women discover the empty tomb?  These apologists certainly think so, and historical records agree on women’s unreliability.  Josephus, a first-century historian, stated, “Let not the testimony of women be admitted because of the levity and boldness of their sex,” and the Mishnah (a Jewish legal text written in 220 CE) concurs.

However, this flimsy argument is much more popular than it deserves to be.  I’ll respond in several ways.

Give the original authors credit for being good storytellers.  As plot twists go, having women make the discovery instead of men isn’t particularly shocking.  But if you find it a powerful argument for the truth of the story, then you can imagine why that element might have become attached to the story.

The gospel story wasn’t made up.  The point that women were unreliable witnesses is relevant only in rebutting the charge that the story was deliberately invented, a claim I don’t make.  I’ve never heard this hypothesis except by apologists.  Instead, what best fits the facts for me is that the story documented in the gospels (in incompatible versions, but that’s another story) is the result of forty or more years of oral history.  Each gospel is a snapshot of the tradition of a different church community in widely different places (perhaps Alexandria, Damascus, or Rome?) and over decades of time.

Believers might demand, “Well, how do you explain the empty tomb?”  But of course, that assumes the accuracy of the gospel story to that point.  It’s like saying, “How do you explain Jack’s cutting down the beanstalk any other way than that there really was a giant climbing down after him?”

Who cares about women’s “unreliability”?  Women discover the empty tomb, they tell men, the men verify the story, and then the men spread the word.  If you don’t like women as witnesses, you’ve got the men.

That women were less reliable as witnesses in court doesn’t matter because there is no court in the story!  The women were trustworthy where it mattered—in conveying the story to people who knew and trusted them.

Tending to the dead was women’s work in this culture.  Instead of women discovering that Jesus had risen, imagine this incident:

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, Simon Peter and James entered the kitchen to prepare bread for the community.  In the darkness of the kitchen, a voice called out to them saying, “Why do you tend to minor matters when there is the LORD’s work to be done?”  And they took hold of His feet and worshiped Him.

What’s wrong with this story?  It’s that preparing bread is women’s work in this culture.  It makes no sense to have men come across Jesus in the kitchen.  And the same is true for men dealing with the dead.  According to the Women in the Bible web site:

It was the women’s task to prepare a dead body for burial. … Tombs were visited and watched for three days by family members. On the third day after death, the body was examined. … On these occasions, the body would be treated by the women of the family with oils and perfumes. The women’s visit to the tombs of Jesus and Lazarus are connected with this ritual.

The Bible also gives clues to women’s role in mourning in Jer. 9:17–20 and 2 Sam. 14:2.

Mark focuses on reversals, and the other gospels followed Mark’s lead.  Richard Carrier gives a detailed discussion of this topic and argues that a the-last-shall-be-first philosophy led Mark to add this touch.

Given Mark’s narrative agenda, regardless of the actual facts, the tomb has to be empty, in order to confound the expectations of the reader, just as a foreign Simon must carry the cross instead of Peter, a Gentile must acknowledge Christ’s divinity instead of the Jews, a Sanhedrist must bury the body, and women must be the first to hear the Good News.

He continues with a fascinating hypothesis about the relevance of the names of the three women that Mark places at the empty tomb.  You can read the argument and decide for yourself if it’s well founded.

Seeing the gospel story as no more supernatural than any other myth from the past best explains the facts.

Photo credit

Related links:

10 Reasons the Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense

Posted on by
5

Does God exist? You wouldn't think so given the bizarre crucifixion story.It’s Good Friday, and I’d like to rerun one of my most popular posts, about the crucifixion. 

I’m afraid that the crucifixion story doesn’t strike me as that big a deal.

The Christian will say that death by crucifixion was a horrible, humiliating way to die.  That the death of Jesus was a tremendous sacrifice, more noble and selfless than a person sacrificing himself for the benefit of a butterfly.  And isn’t it worth praising something that gets us into heaven?

Here are ten reasons why I’m unimpressed.

1. Sure, death sucks, but why single out this one?  Lots of people die.  In fact, lots died from crucifixion.  The death of one man doesn’t make all the others insignificant.  Was Jesus not a man but actually a god?  If so, that fact has yet to be shown.

It’s not like this death is dramatically worse than death today.  Crucifixion may no longer be a worry, but cancer is.  Six hours of agony on the cross is pretty bad, but so is six months of agony from cancer.

2. What about that whole hell thing?  An eternity of torment for even a single person makes Jesus’s agony insignificant by comparison, and it counts for nothing when you consider the billions that are apparently going to hell.

3. Jesus didn’t even die.  The absurdity of the story, of course, is the resurrection.  If Jesus died, there’s no miraculous resurrection, and if there’s a resurrection, there’s no sacrifice through death.  Miracle or sacrifice—you can’t have it both ways.  The gospels don’t say that he died for our sins but that he had a rough couple of days for our sins.

4. Taking on the sin vs. removal of sin aren’t symmetric.  We didn’t do anything to get original sin.  We just inherited it from Adam.  So why do we have to do anything to get the redemption?  If God demands a sacrifice, he got it.  That’s enough.  Why the requirement to believe to access the solution?

5. The reason behind the sacrifice—mankind’s original sin—makes no sense.  Why blame Adam for a moral lapse that he couldn’t even understand?  Remember that he hadn’t yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so who could blame him when he made a moral mistake?

And how can we inherit original sin from Adam?  Why blame us for something we didn’t do?  That’s not justice, and the Bible agrees:

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin (Deut. 24:16)

6. Jesus made a sacrifice—big deal.  Jesus is perfect, so his doing something noble is like water flowing downhill.  It’s unremarkable since he’s only acting out his nature.  What else would you expect from a perfect being?

But imagine if I sacrificed myself for someone.  In the right circumstance, I’d risk my life for a stranger—or at least I hope I would.  That kind of sacrifice is very different.  A selfish, imperfect man acting against his nature to make the ultimate unselfish sacrifice is far more remarkable than a perfect being acting according to his nature, and yet people make sacrifices for others all the time.  So why single out the actions of Jesus?  Aren’t everyday noble actions by ordinary people more remarkable and laudable?

7. What is left for God to forgive?  The Jesus story says that we’ve sinned against God (a debt).  Let’s look at two resolutions to this debt.

(1) God could forgive the debt of sin.  You and I are asked to forgive wrongs done against us, so why can’t God?  Some Christians say that to forgive would violate God’s sense of justice, but when one person forgives another’s debt, there’s no violation of justice.  For unspecified reasons, God doesn’t like this route.

And that leaves (2) where Jesus pays for our sin.  But we need to pick 1 or 2, not both.  If Jesus paid the debt, there’s no need for God’s forgiveness.  There’s no longer anything for God to forgive, since there’s no outstanding debt.

Here’s an everyday example: when I pay off my mortgage, the bank doesn’t in addition forgive my debt.  There’s no longer a debt to forgive!  Why imagine that God must forgive us after he’s already gotten his payment?

8. The Jesus story isn’t even remarkable within mythology.  Jesus’s sacrifice was small compared to the Greek god Prometheus, who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity.  Zeus discovered the crime and punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock so that a vulture could eat his liver.  Each night, his liver grew back and the next day the vulture would return, day after agonizing day.  The gospel story, where Jesus is crucified once and then pops back into existence several days later, is unimpressive by comparison.

9. The Bible itself rejects God’s savage “justice.”  This is the 21st century.  Must Iron Age customs persist so that we need a human sacrifice?  If God loves us deeply and he wants to forgive us, couldn’t he just … forgive us?  That’s how we do it, and that’s the lesson we get from the parable of the Prodigal Son where the father forgives the son even after being wronged by him.  If that’s the standard of mercy, why can’t God follow it?  Since God is so much greater a being than a human, wouldn’t he be that much more understanding and willing to forgive?

If we were to twist the Prodigal Son parable to match the crucifixion story, the father might demand that the innocent son be flogged to pay for the crime of the prodigal son.  Where’s the logic in that?

10. The entire story is incoherent.  Let’s try to stumble through the drunken logic behind the Jesus story.

God made mankind imperfect and inherently vulnerable to sin.  Living a sinless life is impossible, so hell becomes unavoidable.  That is, God creates people knowing for certain that they’re going to deserve eternity in hell when they die.  Why create people that he knew would be destined for eternal torment?

But don’t worry—God sacrificed Jesus, one of the persons of God, so mankind could go to heaven instead.

So God sacrificed himself to himself so we could bypass a rule that God made himself and that God deliberately designed us to never be able to meet?  I can’t even understand that; I certainly feel no need to praise God for something so nonsensical.  It’s like an abused wife thanking her abuser.  We can just as logically curse God for consigning us to hell from birth.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for being unimpressed by the crucifixion story.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Shroud of Turin: An Easter Miracle?

Posted on by
1

Christian apologetics and atheismThe Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long linen cloth with the faint image of a man.  Imagine the cloth going from feet to head along a man’s back, then folding over the head to continue back to the feet.

Many Christians think that it is the burial shroud of Jesus and that the supernatural energy of resurrecting his dead body burned an image into the cloth.  It first appears in history in 1390 in France and was moved to Turin, Italy in 1578.  Fire and water damage from 1532 are visible on the shroud.

Proponents argue that marks from Jesus’s last hours are on the figure—the nail wounds, the scourgings, and the cuts from the crown of throns—but is this the real burial shroud of Jesus?

The first problem is scriptural.  This doesn’t match the story of the empty tomb from the Bible.

[Simon Peter] saw the strips of linen lying there [in the tomb], as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head.  (John 20:6–7)

Strips of linen (presumably for the body) and a separate head cloth is not a single shroud.  And there is no evidence besides the shroud itself to imagine that first-century Jews buried their dead that way.

They took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen wrappings with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.  (John 19:40)

This wasn’t just a pinch of spice—it was 75 pounds worth (John 19:39).  And yet we see no evidence of all this spice applied to the body in the shroud image.

Next, an artistic problem.  If a linen cloth were laid over a prone person, it would drape over the face.  That is, it would wrap around to some extent.

A typical man’s face is roughly six inches wide.  But it’s more like eleven inches from one ear, across the face, to the other ear.  Granted, the shroud wouldn’t be vacuum-sealed to hug the face completely.  But we would expect to see some wraparound distortion to the image when the shroud was later laid flat.  The image is actually thinner than an ordinary person, not wider, as it ought to be.

Could this have been a hoax or some other fake?  Traffic in holy Christian relics was common during the medieval period—it’s been said that there were enough pieces of the cross to build a ship and enough nails from the crucifixion to hold it together.  And this wasn’t the only shroud—history records forty of them.  Obviously, at least 39 of these must be false.

In fact, our first well-documented discussion of the shroud in 1390 states that it is a forgery and that the artist was known.

(An aside: I’ve written before about the apologists’ Naysayer Argument, that the gospel story must be true because, if it weren’t, we’d have rebuttals from contemporaries.  The Shroud debate nicely defeats this argument.  Our oldest reliable source is a rebuttal of the supernatural claim of the shroud, and yet this obviously didn’t eliminate Christian belief.)

Many problems argue against the shroud being the real thing.  Carbon dating says that the linen is from the 1300s, there is evidence of tempera paint creating the image, 2000-year-old blood should be black and not red, pollen on the shroud seems to be only from Europe and not also Israel, the weave of the fabric doesn’t appear to be authentic, and so on.  Christian apologists have a different way to rationalize away each of these problems, but the most economical explanation, the one that neatly explains the evidence, is that it’s a fake.

There’s a surprisingly large amount of information on this topic.  It is clearly important for a lot of people.  The best that can be said of the shroud is that we can’t prove that it wasn’t the burial cloth of Jesus.  But that’s no reason to believe that it was, at least for anyone who cares about evidence.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links: