Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mit-hermes.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!prls!amdimage!amdcad!amd!vecpyr!lll-crg!seismo!harvard!think!mit-eddie!mit-hermes!daemon From: daemon@mit-hermes.ARPA (The devil himself) Newsgroups: net.philosophy Subject: philosophy Message-ID: <2449@mit-hermes.ARPA> Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 18:13:12 EDT Article-I.D.: mit-herm.2449 Posted: Fri Aug 16 18:13:12 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 07:05:29 EDT Organization: The MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA Lines: 107 From ROBCHRJ%YALEVMX.BITNET@UCB-VAX.BERKELEY.EDU Fri Aug 16 18:12:30 1985 Received: from UCB-VAX.BERKELEY.EDU (ucb-vax.arpa.ARPA) by MIT-HERMES.ARPA (4.12/4.8) id AA02259; Fri, 16 Aug 85 18:12:30 edt Received: from ucbjade.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (JADE.BERKELEY.EDU) by UCB-VAX.BERKELEY.EDU (5.5/1.2) id AA13033; Fri, 16 Aug 85 15:10:14 PDT Received: from UCBVAX.ARPA by ucbjade.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (4.19/4.36.2) id AA01860; Fri, 16 Aug 85 15:09:46 pdt Date: Fri, 16 Aug 85 15:09:45 pdt From: ROBCHRJ%YALEVMX.BITNET@UCB-VAX.BERKELEY.EDU Message-Id: <8508162209.AA01860@ucbjade.CC.Berkeley.ARPA> Apparently-To: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...