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Have you ever noticed how some people tend to assume you're just as dumb as they are?
It's not that they're necessarily being patronizing or disingenuous, they're just genuinely ignorant.
They expect you to believe what they're telling you because they believe it themselves. None
of us are exempt from this, of course - we're all subject to our own limitations here. It
just becomes especially striking when people make the most transparently terrible points,
without even realizing how bad they are. And nowhere is this more apparent than with arguments
for the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. Some people really seem to believe that I'll
find these claims just as compelling as they do, to the point that they fail to anticipate
even the most obvious responses. I have to second-guess myself on this every time, because
I keep thinking I must have missed something - this couldn't possibly be what they're really
saying. But it is. It's just that awful. By far the most glaring oversight is when events
from the Gospels are cited as supporting evidence for the alleged resurrection. This, of course,
presumes that the contents of the Bible are factual and that all of this actually happened.
If that were the case, there would be no need to refer to anything other than the resurrection
story itself, because we've simply assumed that the Gospels are accurate. We could just
point to the part with the resurrection, and say, "There it is!" But if we're trying to
establish the veracity of the resurrection, then the contents of the books which recount
that story can no more be assumed to be true than the very event in question. Some people
have claimed that the contents of the New Testament have remained largely intact and
unchanged throughout the centuries, but that has nothing to do with whether the events
it describes actually took place - unless humans only acquired the ability to write
fiction some time after the first century A.D. But even if we grant that the events
cited in favor of the resurrection really did happen as claimed, an actual resurrection
of Jesus is hardly the only explanation for this, let alone the best or the most likely.
One common argument is that Jesus claimed to be the son of God. Apparently that alone
is supposed to tell us something about whether he was actually divine. Yet many people throughout
history have said they were the son of God, relatives of gods, or gods themselves. Was
all of this true as well? After all, why would someone claim to be the son of God if they
weren't? And yet most of them were probably wrong. The fact that someone has declared
themselves divine says nothing about the truth of the matter. It's also been said that Jesus
supposedly showed exceptional and even supernatural moral wisdom, beyond the ability of any mere
human to articulate. The rapid spread and modern prevalence of Christianity is often
cited in support of this claim. But what part of his moral philosophy could not have been
developed by regular people? Could no human mind figure out that pacifism, humility, personal
virtue, honesty, kindness, loyalty and generosity can be good things? What about this is so
difficult as to be accessible only to the divine? And if the success of Christianity
is supposed to say something about its truth, what does the spread of Islam tell us? Is
the validity of a religion contingent upon demographics now? Even if two billion people
are Christians, that leaves five billion people who aren't. Is that supposed to inspire confidence?
Another key point of this argument is that after Jesus was buried, the stone closing
the tomb was found to have been rolled away, and the tomb itself was empty. Has this never
happened before or since? Was this the only occasion where a body went missing from a
grave? It seems plausible that much like how they put the body in the tomb and rolled a
stone in front of it, maybe someone removed the stone and took the body out. Does any
of this really require the involvement of a god? Is that the only possible explanation
for grave robbery? Of course, some people have claimed that there was a guard watching
the tomb. Could this guard not have been bribed, or distracted, or a secret Christian, or missing
for some reason? It seems we're meant to conclude that an act of God is somehow a better explanation
than a guard being complicit or absent. Apologists have also claimed that Jesus appeared to many
people after his resurrection. And this does occur sometimes. It's just a question of what
actually happened. There's a difference between people claiming to see something, believing
they've seen something, and genuinely seeing something. These are not the same thing. Quite
a few people throughout history have seen things that weren't really there, and most
of the time when people see the dead, this doesn't indicate a resurrection. Jesus certainly
isn't the only one to have appeared in this way, but I doubt that Protestants would give
much credence to supposed apparitions of Mary that have been certified by the Catholic Church.
Even great numbers of people have reported seeing things that didn't and couldn't happen,
like the sun flying around the sky. This is the result of either willful self-deception,
people going along with a popular trend, or an artifact of abnormal brain functioning.
We know that this kind of thing can happen, so why does the alleged resurrection require
any supernatural explanation? Finally, many apologists have cited the conversion of various
non-Christians who purportedly had every reason not to believe as evidence for the truth of
the resurrection. If this is supposed to prove something, what does it mean when someone
who desperately wants to believe in Christianity is nevertheless drawn to atheism? What if
someone has every reason not to want to believe in Islam, but finds themselves convinced to
become a Muslim anyway? This is hardly unique to Christianity. As further evidence of the
devotion of these converts, some people have pointed out that they refused to renounce
their faith even when it led to their martyrdom. Would they really have faced death for the
sake of a lie? Well, it's certainly possible. Maybe they were mistaken, or deluding themselves.
Maybe they were just really stubborn. Do people only die for beliefs that are actually true?
No. People have readily given their lives in the name of all kinds of non-Christian
religions and philosophies, and this does nothing to establish their truth. Unwavering
faith to the point of death is simply a non-denominational feature of humanity. If even Christians will
dismiss the significance of this, how can they use the very same phenomenon in support
of their own religion? All of these arguments demonstrate a startling lack of imagination
and an abject failure to consider the mere possibility that there could be other explanations.
It just hasn't occurred to these people. And even if the resurrection of Jesus happened
exactly as the Bible says, that still doesn't mean it was supernatural or an act of God.
What if it was the work of aliens, or nanotechnology? Or aliens with nanotechnology? At least we
know these things are actually possible. Does that sound ridiculous to you? So why does
it make any more sense to believe that it was literally magic?