Brothers In Arms

I'm ahead of myself.  Here's this evening's video:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/eM0yF .  I reject the Design and First Cause Arguments for the existence of God.  Should i also go further and conclude that Jesus is not a historical figure?  I look at the evidence.

Firstly, the references to Jesus in the work of Josephus are unreliable.  They appear to have been inserted at a later date, as the earliest quotes lack references to Jesus, they have a jarring style with the rest of the passages concerned and are a complete change of subject.  Therefore, they are probably forgeries.  With the Talmud, where the criterion of embarrassment can be applied, although there appear to be references to "Yeshua", they cannot be directly connected to the figure of Jesus as understood by Christians, and are therefore not very useful.

However, there are various reasons for supposing that he may have existed, by which i mean someone who founded Christianity, possibly as a Jewish sect, rather than the miracle-worker born of a virgin who rose from the dead.  The reason i think it's rational to believe this is that claimants to the title of Messiah have existed before and after his time and that it's a possible career for a nice Jewish boy.  Besides this, someone must have written the Sermon on the Mount and the other sayings of Jesus as recorded in the Q document.

Of course, i am being a little disingenuous here but i think this argument should be allowed to stand on its own rather than being affected by ad hominem.  Atheists who flat-out deny the possibility of Jesus's existence are going too far and not being genuinely sceptical.  Of course it's possible that he didn't exist, but it's a bold statement to say he didn't, and it seems to be more about maintaining a strong or extreme position than obeying the demands of logic.

Thisses sources include Holy Week and Hypergraffiti's fascinating series on Seventh Day Adventism, along of course with what i see as hyperpolarisation for irrational reasons.  At the same time, i am rather bothered by my own overstatement here, which is rather similar to the manic street preachers' sneaky manipulation of the truth as manifested in planting people in crowds and producing misleading publicity, which of course i've witnessed at first hand.  Even so, it is the case that both the Design and First Cause Arguments are fatally flawed and i have suggested that people follow the anno to the R&S playlist, so they can easily discover i'm theist if they engage, as is also the case if they read the description.  This gives me an insight into the position of annoying evangelists.  They clearly expect a straightforward message to be rejected early on and therefore  embellish their truth.

So, i'm also thinking about a Holy Week playlist, but of course that could scare a lot of people off so i'm going to have to go on a different tack.  I could bore people senseless with religious videos even though I find them fascinating, so it'll have to be circumlocutory.  So, whereas i can easily think of stuff to do on the doctrine of the Trinity, the Fall and theories of atonement, i think i'm going to have to ration myself there.  Fortunately i can also think of videos on chocolate and Easter eggs.  It's a fine balance.  Hypergraffiti has a knack of producing videos to which i want to respond, and i'm very glad she's decided to start this second channel.  In fact, i'm tempted to respond to her videos but it might annoy her and it certainly wouldn't generate views, though of course Theintrostealer is basically right in his approach.

Another aspect of this video is that it highlights splitting and polarisation for simplicity's sake, along with faux scepticism, so all that's interesting.  Also, Drink And Think is coming up and that's going to be about political correctness, so i ought to put a video together on that.  However, tomorrow is also Big Science, in hypothesis.

It amazes me that people run out of ideas for videos.  This may indicate that i have no quality filter and that they have as many as i get, then realise they're awful and forget them.  Or, it may mean that they're busy or that they've been uploading so long that they have run out of ideas, or that they're more focussed, something which worries me.

Anyway, list of potential videos on Easter:

• Chocolate
• Easter Eggs (metaphorical)
• Atonement
• The Fall

The ones i'm missing out are in my head too but i don't want to hector people about the Lawerd.

God is on your side, especially if you're atheist

Once again twiddling my thumbs waiting for the video to process and upload, but there's other stuff going on provided i get some privacy and computer time today.

Right, here's the vid:

Basically, i believe that if Jesus was around us today, he'd be on the side of the anti-religious new atheism to which we lazily refer as atheism.  Militant atheism and Jesus's mission have a lot in common and share many motivations.  Gandhi once said that he liked our Christ but didn't like our Christians.

Here's a bit of a rant list about what people professing to be Christian have to my knowledge done:

• Plant people in a crowd to pretend to be converted by a street preacher.
• Make posters deceiving people into thinking a meeting was organised by spiritualists when it was actually propaganda against spiritualism.
• Suggest that God wouldn't want my wife to wear a black T-shirt but a nice long floral dress.
• Accuse a friend of lying when he thanked God in a prayer that he was getting more freelance work because it was the "wrong" kind of work and they couldn't believe God would bless something which wasn't a "proper" job.
• Gang up on a gay member of their congregation and chant "OUT, OUT, OUT!" like they were at a Nuremberg rally until he left the church.

Obviously there are many other examples, but these are close to me in the sense that i know the people involved or have experienced them personally.  I'm conscious of things like the embezzlement, active paedophilia, greed and materialism of people professing to be Christian, but these are not my personal experiences.  My own current experience of church is wonderfully positive, as it happens.  I should also mention that once again i've failed to express quite what i meant because i believe that in some circumstances, glossolalia is a valid emotional or spiritual activity.

But, how can you ever say it's Christian to exhort the poor to give all their money away to the church as a test of faith?  An individual might make that choice for themselves, but they can't impose that decision on anyone else, particularly when the person attempting to impose it happens to be a millionaire.

So it comes as no surprise, really, that actually looking at the sayings of Jesus, assuming him to be merely a fictional character, come out on the side of anti-religious atheism on the whole.  You can even go further than that and play with the idea that he was actually an atheist himself, although going by what it says in the gospels that would make him dishonest and a hypocrite.  However, if you wanted to get a powerful message across and the whole world, as far as you knew, was theistic and would probably kill you before you got anywhere, it wouldn't just be suicidal to assert that God didn't exist but also stupid, because it would defeat your aim by getting you murdered before you got anywhere.  Epicurus was very probably atheist but decided against saying that he was for similar reasons.  However, of course i believe that Jesus knew there was a God.  I also believe he was a historical character, and the idea of the Jesus myth is an example of the oddly old-fashioned views taken by the so-called "new" atheism, but that's a blog entry for another time

Christian for fifteen minutes

Today is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my conversion to Christianity, so it seemed like a good idea to commemorate it by posting yet another talking head video:

This follows on from yesterday's video about Christian atheism.  My conversion experience happened soon after leaving home.  I was in a hall of residence at a university and very much missing my friends, though not particularly my family.  I was feeling isolated and depressed, and was befriended by Christians.  I already believed in God, so it didn't seem like too big a jump to become Christian, but my misgivings were around the idea that questioning would become problematic.  I was assured that it would not be, so i took the leap of faith and committed myself to Christ.  This is in the entirely conventional evangelical sense of being a "born-again Christian".  That is in fact what i am, in spite of appearances to the contrary.

Almost immediately afterwards, i had huge problems.  I tried to ignore them, prayed about them, searched for answers in Scripture about them, all to no avail.  I hid them from other Christians, but wrote screeds and screeds of stuff about them.  Then i went home for Christmas.

When i came back, i decided to confront the issue head-on.  I raised the first issue with my friends - rejection of other religions.  Later on came the equally troublesome issue of Christian homophobia.  I continued to raise similar issues throughout the rest of the year.  Many of my friends were fine about it, but a few saw me as recalcitrant and uncooperative, and that my approach was as if the problems were uniquely mine.  I think they had a point with the last bit, which was quite insightful, but even now haven't managed to do anything with it.

After nearly a year, i completely gave up on the religion, having decided that St Paul was the worst thing to have happened to the planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and went on to live a largely secular life.  I could mention how God pursues people who have done this at this point, but it would probably annoy the secular readers, so i won't.  Suffice it to say that i was not impressed by religious approaches, although i still found them interesting.  Jainism was a particular interest of mine, as expressed on YouTube.

The years went by, i became anarchist and vegan, did postgrad, got married of all things, had children and then, after twelve years in the wilderness, came back to Church.  This time, i did it on my own terms, and also on God's, but then i would say that wouldn't i?  In the meantime i had learned of various things associated with Christianity which were more positive, such as the Student Christian Movement, and realised that the Christianity i had been "sold" was not the whole story.  This is an ongoing process.

Now, this may not be very Christian of me but i don't really care whether someone believes in God or not.  It doesn't seem to be the most important thing about them to me.  I would be more interested in their political and ethical beliefs than their religious beliefs.  I think people are increasingly polarised between a narrow version of Christianity and a narrow version of atheism, and those two narrow versions have a lot more in common with each other than people like to admit.  What we need to do is forget our differences and work together to make the world a better place.  This conflict is a waste of energy and does nothing to benefit the weakest, poorest and oppressed.  That's what we need to be doing:  building a Paradise on Earth.  That's an urgent priority and we have to stop squabbling and do what we all know we're meant to be doing with our lives.