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From: daemon@mit-hermes.ARPA (The devil himself)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: philosophy
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Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 18:13:12 EDT
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Posted: Fri Aug 16 18:13:12 1985
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Subject: Re: A cross-posting request
References: <258@frog.UUCP>, <1063@ihlpg.UUCP>

>>    2) Faith (an idiotic part) is the essence of
>>       religion.  (Faith is the practice of claiming
>>       truth without evidence.  I am not concerned
>>       with other meanings of the word, like "trust".)

>      By your definition, then, Christianity is not a religion.
> (I'm using Christianity for the sake of sticking to what I know.)  Evidence
> for my assertion internal to the system:  in I Corinthians, Paul talks about -
> the resurrection of Jesus, because some people were going into the church
> and claiming that there was no resurrection of the dead, and not even Jesus
> rose from the dead.
>      Paul didn't say, believe because I said so.  He didn't say,
> it's written on the sky, and if you can't read it, it's because you don't
> have enough of this mythical 'faith.'  He gave what, in your definition, is a
> completely NON-religious answer:  "There are nearly 500 living witnesses to
> the public death and equally public post-resurrection appearances of Jesus;
> go and ask *them* what *they* saw!"

The first time I encountered this argument was in a book by someone (I forget
the name) who appears to be in charge of Apologetics for the Campus Crusade
for Christ.  He phrased the argument in very much the same way, and also gave
an analogy to courtroom method.  Here are twelve people who along with many
others saw Jesus executed in a public place; and yet they claim that they have
seen him alive.  Other people have seen him alive too.  Are we going to claim
that they are all crazy, or lying?  Is this not good, incontrovertible
evidence for the actual resurrection of Jesus?  This doesn't require 'faith':
it's eyewitness evidence, just like the eyewitness evidence that is used to
determine the truth every day in courts of law.

I'll confess I was dumbfounded for a couple of days after this.  It's one
thing to say that the Bible, like any text, can be mistaken; but it's another
to say that hundreds of people who claim that they'd seen a
miracle like this could be lying or mistaken.  After all, as he said, we
believe a lot of stranger things on the basis of one eyewitness, or just
because some scientist published it in a journal.

I thought for a while that I'd just been logically forced to join the Campus
Crusade for Christ until it occurred to me exactly what sort of eyewitness
we were talking about.  Jesus and his disciples lived in Israel under the
Roman occupation.  This is well known, but people don't always understand
what it implies.  Israel at the time was seething with rebellion.  Jewish
nationalist movements and conspiracies were everywhere.  And self-proclaimed
messiahs were everywhere.  Less than fifty years after Jesus died, one such
messiah, Manahem, led a rebellion that eventually led to the destruction of the
Temple and the mass suicide at Masada.  And in 132, Bar Kochva (Son of a Star)
managed to revolt and set up an independent Jewish state that lasted for three
years until the Romans crushed it and instituted the Diaspora.

To sum up: the Jews at that time were primed and ready for a messiah to
appear.  They thought that John the Baptist was the Messiah (remember how the
crowds kept asking if Jesus was actually John?), they thought that Jesus was
the Messiah; there were at least five other messiahs executed by Rome between
40 B.C. and 73 A.D.  In such a time of tumult, fanaticism, and social unrest,
perhaps it would be wise to take "eyewitness reports" with a grain of salt.

To take a modern example: do any of you know members of the Unification
Church?  If you do, can you imagine how many of them would be willing to swear
to miracles that they had seen performed before their very eyes?  Or perhaps
you remember that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a famous and well-respected
psychologist, went on record as saying that she had had sexual intercourse
with spirits from another plane of existence.  I don't mean to equate these
with Christian teachings; I just want to point out that people have seen and
said some pretty strange things in the past.  It's hard to say that we should
believe Paul and the others without asking why we shouldn't also pay attention
to the many miracles and auguries of, say, pagan times.  And to complete the
analogy to legal procedure: I can think of few courts of law that would rule
that someone had been raised from the dead, even with the testimony of five
hundred witnesses.  (Especially if those witnesses all had strong religious
and political motives to have seen what they claimed to see.)

Incidentally, on the question of faith: even if we grant that Jesus said and
did what the gospels say, and that he was raised from the dead, there is still
the question of what it all means.  Consider the following hypothesis:  there
is an all-powerful Evil Deity who created us so he could watch us suffer.  He
resurrected Jesus and gave his word such veracity so that Christians would go
into the next world all hopeful and be even more remorseful when they
discovered that they had been wrong all along.  Christianity is just something
to make us more miserable in the long run.

Of course I don't believe this, but it is logically consistent with the facts.
And I feel compelled to point out that even though both Christianity and
the Evil Deity are possible, no one wants to believe in the Evil Deity.  In
fact, I don't know of any religion that proclaims that we will pass through
this vale of tears in order to get to a worse place.


Chris Roberson    
Calhoun College, Yale University
----
..in a grip-like vise...