Monthly Archives: November 2014

Responding to “10 Myths About God”

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Christian mythsCredo House, an Oklahoma coffee shop and Christian ministry, made “10 Myths about God,” a video series that rejects ten Christian myths. I like rejecting myths about God, so let’s run through them and search for common ground.

Myth 1: Christianity is blind faith. We’re told that it’s a myth that Christianity is not warranted or reasoned. It doesn’t ask you to check your brain at the door. Remember that Jesus told us to love him with our heart, soul, and mind. In Isaiah, God says, “Let us reason together.” (I’ll use blue for the myth, green for the correction by the video, and black for my own comments.)

I will use reason to evaluate the remarkable claims of Christianity regardless, but it’s nice to see that the guys are on board. Things go a little off the rails when one of the hosts lampoons the idea of blind faith with this example: “It would be like someone telling you, ‘2 + 2 = 5; I know it doesn’t make any sense … but just have faith.’”

Which is precisely what Pastor Peter LaRuffa recently said for real: “If somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn’t question what I’m reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it.” As with Poe’s Law, you may not be able to make up a nutty Christian view that someone doesn’t embrace.

Another claim made in this first video is that God doesn’t do things in hiding. However, that’s not quite what Jesus said:

I praise you, Father … because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children (Matthew 11:25).

The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, “though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand” (Luke 8:10).

Paul also speaks of hidden mysteries:

We declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. (1 Corinthians 2:7).

The message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known (Romans 16:25–6).

Finally, I’ll take exception to the comparison made between God and one’s spouse, that a spouse would welcome your wanting to learn more, and the same is true of God. But God is dramatically unlike a spouse on so many other critical points (a spouse reliably responds when you talk to them, clearly exists, doesn’t kill people) that there’s little reason to trust that he’s like a spouse on this point.

Myth 2: The Bible is a magic book. Don’t flip open the Bible, select a verse at random, and expect it to tell your fortune like a crystal ball.

This sounds like good advice, but I wonder then why they didn’t follow it when picking a new twelfth disciple after the death of Judas. To select between two candidates, “They cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias” (Acts 1:26).

Our hosts describe this wrong thinking: “It’s like God’s just wanting to send us tweets.” But I’d be surprised if these guys don’t infer God indirectly nudging them through everyday events—a beautiful sunset, say, or a random thought, or an unwanted accident.

We’re told that the Bible has dual authorship: it’s “fully from God and fully from Man.” But in what way is it fully from God? Is it protected from error? No, copies are full of errors, some deliberate, and our best guesses at the originals of some books contradict other books.

They say, “[The Bible] is not difficult to understand, but it does take work.” If by “understand,” you mean that there’s a single, consistent message available to the patient scholar, then explain the 42,000 denominations and the fact that Christian sects aren’t converging (more here and here).

This is yet another example where the Bible could do something supernatural, but its apologists say that, no, it can’t do that. It’s authored by God, and yet supernatural authorship is no more apparent than with the holy books of the Hindus or Muslims.

Myth 3: God wants us healthy and wealthy. God is like our biological father, and it’s natural to imagine that God wants the best for us and shows his anger when bad things happen.

Apparently, though, these “God is like a spouse/father/judge/whatever” analogies are like Play-Doh that can be shaped to support the apologetic argument of the moment. This time, God is not like a loving father who wants us to prosper and to instruct us plainly. No, God’s love must be inferred through life’s difficulties.

Remember how God allowed Satan to ruin Job’s life (Satan was God’s prosecuting attorney at this part of the story). Or how Paul imagined Jesus saying, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8–10). Or the caution, “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you” (1 Peter 4:12). God is apparently a tough-love kind of father.

But as with most arguments built on Bible verses, two can play that game. For starters, remember that Job was wealthy before God’s little project, and God made him doubly so afterwards. One message from this story seems to be that God may test you, but he’ll make it worth your while afterwards.

Preachers of the prosperity gospel use the very same Bible to make clear that God does want you healthy and wealthy.

No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it (John 14:14).

Our hosts tell us that God loves us dearly but will (for his own good reasons) put us through hard times, up to and including the death of our children.

This reminds me of a podcast from this same organization where they wrestled with the problem of a father who had lost his 20-ish son. Because the son was not “saved,” not only had the father lost a son, but his own theology put his son in torment in hell!

And Christians wonder what atheists could possibly find troublesome about Christianity …

The final insult from this video is the idea that living with pain and suffering makes us love God even more. Then what’s the difference between the Christian and a battered spouse? I mean, besides the fact that the abusing spouse actually exists?

Continue with Part 2.

We are the pure and chosen few
And all the rest are damned
There’s room enough in hell for you.
We don’t want heaven crammed.
— wisdom from the Plymouth Brethren,
as told by Christopher Hitchens

Photo credit: Boston Public Library

The Curious Tale of the Angel of Mons

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Did you see the 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks starring Angela Lansbury? Set in World War II, the Germans invade a peaceful British town, but a ghostly and invulnerable battalion of animated suits of armor from the local museum fights off this modern force.

This wasn’t just an active imagination on the part of the screenwriters. No, this came from history.

It was August of 1914, near Mons in Belgium. The German army was making its sweep into France in the opening stages of World War I. Heavily outnumbered units of the British Expeditionary Force came under vastly superior German fire, and their destruction seemed assured. But in perhaps the strangest tale in modern warfare, the British were saved at the last moment by an inexplicable heavenly presence: a brigade of warrior angels appeared and wrought destruction upon the Germans, handing the day and the victory to the British.

This is an excerpt from Skeptoid.com. The episode goes on to expose the myth, noting that the origin of the supernatural part comes from the short story “The Bowmen” by Arthur Machen, published five weeks after the battle. Machen was inspired by the Battle of Agincourt, the stunning and overwhelming English victory that took place almost exactly 500 years before the Battle of Mons. He imagined the ghosts of those English and Welsh archers using their fabled longbows to annihilate the Germans like they had done to the French cavalry centuries earlier in the same part of Europe.

Some months later, archers became angels in an article of supposed battlefield remembrances, and the angelic story was solidified by several books years later. The story inspired Mary Norton, author of the two books from which Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks was adapted.

Parallel with the gospel story

Granted, the horde of angels was never part of any official account of the battle, and even within the British public during the war this was probably a minority belief. But similarly, the historical resurrection of Jesus was never part of any modern consensus view of history, and Christianity has always been a minority of worldwide belief (according to 2010 estimates, Roman Catholics are 16.85% and Protestants are 6.15%).

If some combination of outright fiction, selective memory, and wishful thinking can become history in our well-educated modern era, shouldn’t this natural explanation win out over the supernatural Jesus story?

Is Islam such a weak religion
that it cannot tolerate a book written against it?
Not my Islam!
— father of 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Malala Yousafzai

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/25/12.)

Photo credit:Lichfield District Council

Upcoming Debate on God’s Existence 11/15/14

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debateI have a public debate on the question “Does God exist?” on November 15, 2014 at 6pm in the Shelton Civic Center (Shelton, WA).

I’ll be debating Rand Wagner, a local Christian with masters degrees in Exegetical Theology (Western Seminary) and Christian Apologetics (Biola University).

It’s a free event, and if you can make it, I’d love to see you there. If you’re a regular here at the Cross Examined blog, be sure to say hello.

Address, more details, and last-minute updates here.

Photo credit: Jay Trinidad

How Decades of Oral Tradition Corrupted the Gospels

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(See the first in this series of posts traveling the tortuous journey from 21st-century Western culture back to the original story of Jesus here.)

Imagine that the year is 50 CE and you are a merchant in Judea or Galilee. A traveler stops at your house and asks for lodging, and you comply. After dinner, you chat with your new acquaintance and mention that you have recently become a follower of the Jewish messiah, Jesus. He is unaware of Jesus and asks to hear more, and you tell the complete gospel story, from the birth of Jesus through his ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection. Your guest is excited by the story and eager to pass it on. He asks that you tell it again.

Instead, you ask him to tell the story so that you can correct any errors. He goes through the story twice, with you making corrections and adding bits to the story that you’d forgotten in the first telling.

You’ve now spent the entire night telling the powerful story, but you and your new friend agree that it was time well spent. He is on his way, and a week later the events are repeated, but this time your friend plays host to a traveler and the Good News is passed on to a new convert.

Imagine how long you would need to summarize the gospel story and how many times you’d need to correct yourself with, “Oh wait a minute—there was one more thing that came before” or “No, not Capernaum … I think it was Caesarea.” That confusing tale would be a lot for an initiate to remember, and yet this imaginary encounter was about as good as it got for passing on so complex a story. Consider other less perfect scenarios—getting fragments of the story from different people over months or years or having two believers arguing over details as they try to tell the story in tandem.

“And then Jesus healed the centurion’s slave—”

“No, no—that’s when he healed the daughter of Jairus! Or Gyrus, or something. And it wasn’t the centurion’s slave, it was his son. Or maybe his servant, I forget.”

(And so on.)

Christian response

Apologists appreciate the problem of oral history when they argue that the earliest gospel was written just 20 to 30 years after the resurrection instead historians’ typical estimate of 40 years, but this does little to resolve the problem.

Let’s give them that. Let’s assume just twenty years of oral history in a pre-scientific culture produced a story about the Creator of the Universe coming to earth. What certainty can we have that such a whopper is correct?

Christians and atheists can agree that the period of oral history is a concern, but what is rarely acknowledged is the translation that happened at the same time.

A modern parallel

To see this, first consider a different example. In response to the 1858 sightings of Mary at Lourdes, France by a 14-year-old girl named Bernadette, the local bishop investigated and concluded a year and a half later that the sightings were genuine. Bernadette and the bishop were from the same culture and spoke the same language.

The gospel story had a much more harrowing journey. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish culture, but this isn’t where the gospel came from. Every book in the New Testament was written in Greek and came from a Greek culture. The story would have been heard in and (to some extent) adapted to a Greek context.

For example, imagine a gospel without the water-into-wine story. “Wait a minute,” the Greek listener might say. “The Oenotropae could change water into wine. If Jesus was god, couldn’t he do that as well?”

Or imagine a gospel without the healing miracles. “Asclepius was generous with his healing gifts and even raised the dead. Didn’t Jesus do anything like that?”

Or a gospel without the resurrection. “Dionysus was killed and then was reborn. You mean Jesus just died, and that was it?”

In fact, the earliest books in the Bible are Paul’s letters, which have almost nothing of the gospel story—no healings, no parables, no feeding the 5000, and no virgin birth. The Jesus of Paul performs no miracles, gives no Sermon on the Mount, has no public ministry, and gives no Great Commission. Might passage through Greek culture have added some of these elements?

Humans have a long history of adapting gods to their own culture—for example, the Greek god Heracles became Hercules when he was adopted by the Romans. Athena became Minerva, Poseidon became Neptune, Aphrodite became Venus, and Zeus became Jupiter. The Hebrews adopted the Mesopotamian flood story of Gilgamesh as well as the Sumerian water model of the cosmos.

We know how stories evolve in our own time. As Richard Carrier notes (video @ 26:00), the evolution of the Jesus story is like the evolution of the Roswell UFO Incident. A guy finds some sticks and Mylar in the desert, and this was interpreted as debris from a crashed spaceship. But within 30 years, the story had morphed. Now, a spaceship crashed in the desert, and the military autopsied the dead aliens and is reverse-engineering their advanced technology.

Spreading the Word in an oral culture

Let’s return to your telling the story to the new convert. How close was your version of the story to that in the New Testament? And how similar would the new guy’s telling of the story be to the one that you told him? How much variation is added with each retelling?

The gospel story was an oral tradition for four decades or more before finally being written down. That’s a lot of time for the story to evolve.

Christians may respond that by relying on writing, our memory skills have atrophied. In an oral culture like that in first-century Palestine, people became very good at memorization.

Yes, it’s possible that people memorized the Jesus story so that they could retell it the same as it was taught to them, but there is no reason to imagine that this was how it was passed along. Indeed, it’s wrong to assume that storytellers in an oral culture always wanted to repeat a story with perfect accuracy. We care about perfect accuracy because we come from a literate culture. Only because we have the standard of the written word do we assume that other cultures would want to approximate this unvarying message.

The theory of oral-formulaic composition argues instead that tales are often changed with the retelling to adapt to the audience or to imperfect memory. Any transcription of such a tale (like a single written version of the Iliad) would simply be a snapshot of a single telling, and you would deceive yourself if you imagined that this gives an accurate record of the story. This is seen in modern-day oral epic poetry in the Balkans and is guessed to be the structure of Homeric epic storytelling as well.

But this is a tangent. The gospel story wasn’t an epic poem, but rather a story passed from person to person. It changed with time, just like any story does.

The gossip fence is a better analog than Homer.

Read the first post in this series: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?

When a person is determined to believe something,
the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.
— Letters of Junius 12/19/1769

Photo credit: Wikimedia

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/12.)