I’d like to suggest something for the hard-to-buy-for people on your Christmas list—something a little more intellectual than a tie or gift certificate. My book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey (2011) is available at Amazon, either as a paperback or an ebook.
While many books discuss the Christianity vs. atheism debate, this book takes a fictional approach to tough apologetics arguments. Indeed, the intellectual debate becomes another character within the story.
The book targets two audiences. First, it gives thoughtful Christians something to think about and encourages complacent Christians to critique the foundations of their religion. Many Christian leaders make exactly this point, that they too want to push Christians to think. The book is an intellectual workout—a taxing project, perhaps, but one that leaves the reader a stronger person.
Second, I want to reach atheists who might enjoy approaching these intellectual arguments in fiction rather than in the usual nonfiction form.
The book is set in Los Angeles in 1906, in an odd new church that is suddenly world famous. The pastor’s prediction of imminent disaster had been front-page news the day before the great San Francisco earthquake—true story. Here’s the back-cover summary:
In 1906, three men share a destiny forged by a prophecy of destruction. That prophecy comes true with staggering force with the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and young assistant pastor Paul Winston is cast into spiritual darkness when his fiancée is among the dead. Soon Paul finds himself torn between two powerful mentors: the charismatic pastor who rescued him from the street and an eccentric atheist who gradually undercuts Christianity’s intellectual foundation.
As he grapples with the shock to love and faith, Paul’s past haunts him. He struggles to retain his faith, the redemptive lifesaver that keeps him afloat in a sea of guilt. But the belief that once saved him now threatens to destroy the man he is becoming.
Paul discovers that redemption comes in many forms. A miracle of life. A fall from grace. A friend resurrected. A secret discovered. And maybe, a new path taken. He realizes that religion is too important to let someone else decide it for him. The choice in the end is his—will it be one he can live with?
Cross Examined challenges the popular intellectual arguments for Christianity and invites the reader to shore them up … or discard them. Take the journey and see where it leads you.
Buy copies for those hard-to-buy-for friends who would enjoy a little different approach to the Christian/atheist debate. It’s guaranteed to be far more intellectually stimulating than a tie or gift certificate (and less cliché than frankincense or myrrh).
Bob Seidensticker
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Video: Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?
The idea that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses (or were a step removed) is popular, but where’s the evidence?
Here’s a brief video rebuttal (best when viewed Full Screen).
This kind of project is new for me, so let me know what you think.
I’ve discussed this topic before, and that blog post has references.
The most savage controversies are those about matters
as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
— Bertrand Russell
War on Christmas?
Catholic League president Bill Donohue is once again hot under the collar about the War on Christmas. In short, he’s annoyed at the consequences of living in a country governed by a secular Constitution.
Last year he lamented:
A school counselor at an Arkansas elementary school has been told that she must remove her posting of a nativity scene on her billboard; her decoration was permitted for more than 20 years. Tulsa, Oklahoma has long had a Christmas parade, but this year it was renamed the Holiday parade.
So your religious claims are so flabby that you need the government to help support them? Aren’t parents and churches and the plain truth of your message enough? And why mention the 20 years—do wrong things stop being wrong once they’re traditions?
Let’s switch things around a bit to make sure we’re being consistent. What if a school employee had been told to remove displays of a Wiccan celebration for Samhain or a Satanic celebration for the winter solstice? Or if city money had been prevented from funding celebrations of the Hindu festivals of Holi or Diwali?
Public schools and publicly funded celebrations must be religion-neutral, which sounds like a good arrangement for Christians, atheists, and everyone else.
In another article, Donohue says:
There are two ways government can practice neutrality: the tolerant way, which is to allow all world religions a limited period of time to display their wares in the public square; and the intolerant way, favored by liberals, which is to censor everyone. We vote for the former.
I can accept that, but then you have cases like Santa Monica, in which spots for displays in a public park were distributed by lottery in 2011. Atheist organizations won 18 out of 21 spots, and some Christians were up in arms. Sometimes when you play the “allow all religions time to display their wares” game, it backfires.
Here’s a simple solution: avoid using public land or buildings for religious displays. They already have plenty of tax-supported publicity. Easy, right?
Donohue fulminates anew against more insults to Christianity in this year’s broadside:
Students at an elementary school in Little Rock, Arkansas were recently invited to see the play, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” at a local church. … A ruckus ensued when one atheist complained. …
For several decades, the Illinois village of Alsip has erected a cross on its water tower, but this year it will not be displayed
Bill, why is this hard? Keep telling me about breaches of the First Amendment in your annual dispatches from the front lines of the War on Christmas, and I’ll keep rooting for the Constitution. No, the atheist groups supporting the separation of church and state aren’t Grinches; they’re trying to protect your rights.
After last year’s fuss, Santa Monica decided to not have any holiday displays. Peace on earth? No, Mr. Donohue was as cranky as Ebenezer Scrooge:
Today’s atheists have no identity save for what they are against. What else but malice would drive atheists to display their hate-filled message alongside religious symbols in Santa Monica last year?
When the atheists got their displays trashed, I’m not sure the malice was coming from the atheists. And why the rage—are churches off limits for religious displays? Are they illegal on private property? I’m missing the problem.
It’s time for Pat Robertson’s insightful seasonal message as well. His analysis:
Atheists don’t like our happiness. They don’t want you to be happy; they want you to be miserable. They’re miserable so they want you to be miserable.
(Okay—who leaked the Atheist Master Plan?!)
Bill O’Reilly won’t be outdone, and he called David Silverman’s American Atheists a “merry band of fascists” and pretended that Christianity isn’t a religion but a philosophy. It was a bumbling attempt at bypassing the First Amendment’s prohibition against an “establishment of religion” that I doubt many Christians would agree that worshipping the Creator of the Universe is a philosophy.
These self-appointed nursemaids of the public good seem to imagine that religions don’t have the opportunity to spread the word or that their existence is a mystery to people. Or perhaps they fear that Christians’ faith is so fragile that it must be propped up with frequent reminders.
Either these blowhards are out of touch with reality or they don’t trust that Christianity’s message is convincing. Neither casts them in a good light.
’Twas the night before Christmas; the Christians all hunkered
In basements of buildings they’d armored and bunkered.
They huddled in silence; they huddled in fear,
With thoughts that the atheists soon would draw near.
(read the rest at Digital Cuttlefish)
Photo credit: Wikimedia
Jesus a Legend: A Dozen Reasons (Part 2)
C.S. Lewis is famous for his Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trilemma—Jesus must be a liar (he knew that his claims of deity were false), a lunatic (he was crazy, which explains his nutty claims), or he was who he said he was, the Lord. But, of course, this ignores the bin into which we put similar claims—Legend. (You may want to read the introductory post and part 1 of this list.)
Let’s conclude the list of twelve possible Christian rebuttals to the legend hypothesis.
Just how skeptical are you? If you doubt the Jesus story, why imagine you can trust the stories of other figures from ancient history—Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, for example? If you dismiss the Jesus story for insufficient evidence, the same logic discards most of our knowledge of history.
The big difference between the gospel story and historical account of the great leaders of antiquity is that the gospel story makes miracle claims, and any such claims in historical accounts have been scrubbed out. I discuss this in depth here.
The game of Telephone is a poor analogy. There is no chance for participants to verify what they heard; they must simply repeat as best as they can a message that is deliberately convoluted. Not only could hearers of the gospel story ask for clarification, they could search out the source and verify it with him.
I agree that the game of Telephone is an incomplete analogy, in particular because of the huge time difference. A story passed from person to person over the course of 10 minutes can’t go through half a dozen people without significant change, and for the gospels we’re talking 30 to 60 years!
When you tell me a story, you’re right that I have the chance to make sure that I got it right, but why would I take advantage of that? I could easily have gotten it wrong but wouldn’t know. When I pass it on, particularly a story as long as the gospel, I will (inadvertently) add my errors. And so on as the story is retold from person to person—no maliciousness and no central authority directing things, just fallible people doing their fallible best.
The Christian position seems to imagine a web of authorities, quick to correct any error in each telling of the story. But it’s unreasonable to imagine these authorities everywhere, eavesdropping on each conversation like Big Brother. And when someone said, “Hold on—that’s not how I heard the Jesus story,” which person was right? There was no written authority to consult before the gospels. Oral history isn’t self-correcting; errors are likelier to accumulate with time.
Could eyewitnesses have been the final authority? That’s implausible given that eyewitness were likely far away. The gospels were written in cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, decades after the events. We can have no certainty that the handful of disciples of Jesus still alive at the time would be in Alexandria and Corinth and Damascus and Rome (or wherever the various gospels were written), ready to rein in incorrect stories.
The gospels were written by (or perhaps were one step removed) from eyewitnesses. And don’t you think that the sight of something as remarkable as the risen Christ would be seared almost flawlessly into someone’s memory? That memory wouldn’t fade in a few decades.
This is a poor analogy. In the first place, we start with the fact that we have the gospel story and work backwards to find the most plausible explanation; we don’t start with the assumption that Jesus rose from the dead and sift facts to support it.
We have no good reason to imagine that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses. The legends behind this claim are flimsy.
As for the accuracy of memory, I might give you an enthusiastic and detailed account of my wedding day and then my wife might give you a different account (“No, it was your Uncle Jim, not my Uncle Ralph, who spilled the punch”). There’s a big difference between confidence and accuracy. We’ve probably all been embarrassed after confidently stating a recollection only to discover later that we were wrong.
Besides, you will declare any supernatural event in my wedding story to be a false recollection! (“No, really—we ran out of wine but some guy made some out of water and saved the day.”) Why give a pass to a story from 2000 years ago that you would reject if it happened yesterday?
You underestimate the memory skills of the ancients. They were trained for this. Think of Homer and other poets who flawlessly retold the Iliad from memory.
Was flawless repeatability even the goal for these poets or would they adapt the tale to the audience? (I’ve written more on that here.)
More importantly, there’s no evidence that early Christians were cautioned to avoid repeating the gospel until they could repeat the entire thing perfectly. If the point of the Jesus story is that the Messiah has come, who cares about the details? For passing along the gospel story in the early decades before it was written, the gossip fence is a better analogy than Homer.
If Jesus rose from the dead and the apostles witnessed and faithfully passed on the story, they did the best that they could. What more could you expect? It was preserved in short order with writing, the most advanced technology they had. Don’t criticize first-century Christians for not having cameras.
Let’s accept that the documentation we have of Jesus’ life is pretty darn good, considering. How does that help provide adequate evidence to support Christianity’s enormous claim? I care nothing for the fact that providing adequate evidence is really hard—without it, the atheist isn’t justified in accepting the claim. In fact, neither is the Christian.
No Christian lets the believer from another religion get away with insufficient evidence, and rightly so. Christianity must meet the same burden.
You’re biased against the supernatural.
And you’re not? If you heard of miracles attributed to Ganesh (a Hindu god) or Hachiman (Shinto) or Sumatinatha (Jain), would you accept that as readily as who won Sunday’s football game?
The facts that we start with are the text of the gospels and the historians’ evaluation of the quality of that evidence. We must find the best explanation for this. We don’t start with a Christian presupposition. That the gospels are legend is quite plausible given how we see stories evolve in our own experience.
What’s the likelihood that Odysseus met a Cyclops, Beowulf killed Grendel, or Jesus returned from the dead? Pretty much zero. The gospel story is as absurd as the moon being made of green cheese.
There are lots of nice things you can do with sand,
but do not try building a house on it.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity