Atheist: Jesus is a myth: Stories appeared decades after 'death'

Jesus Christ was not a real person and is probably the result of a combination of stories about several different individuals, according to a writer and leading atheist activist.

David Fitzgerald, a San Francisco based author, believes he has compiled compelling evidence that proves Jesus did not exist.

He claims there are no contemporary mentions of Jesus in historical accounts from the time when he was supposed to have lived, yet other Jewish sect leaders from the time do appear.

You’re incorrectly using the null hypothesis: assuming something is false until “demonstrated” true, for one thing, and secondly, assigning all creeds as of equal a priori likelihood.

Think of it as methodological parsimony, based on Occam’s Razor, “do not needlessly multiply entities” and all that.

This is done in order to keep science simple (think of epicycles in planetary cosmology, it is much more powerful to use a heliocentric model) and in order to keep people from arguing that “little green men” or pixies or something make water boil.

But, you say, isn’t that what religion *is* ?

Well, no, not really. For two reasons.

First, the idea that people came up with the idea of a god or gods to explain things, seems to me to be itself a myth — that is, the Greeks and Romans had their gods of various things, but the gods themselves spent most of their time arguing with each other and sleeping around, and then causing problems for each others’ favorite nation-states and stomping the odd individual human who got too cheeky (see for example the Apple of Discord...)

The Jewish God was unique (bad pun) in that He was monotheistic: and the creation myth only gave a teleological explanation for a few things: people being bad, crops being hard to grow, and childbirth hurting.
People say all the time “Well, if I were God, why’d He make the universe like xyz? *I’d* make it different...” so I respond, if I were making a Creation myth to sucker people in to explain things, *I’d* make it different than Genesis; and further, if I were making a religion, the sacraments would involve getting drunk and having sex. Oh wait. That’s what some of the Greek gods involved, isn’t it? Bacchus and Aphrodite, orgies and temple prostitutes?

But the other reason the scientific approach to religion doesn’t work is that religion doesn’t claim to be a model (in the scientific usage of the term) in the first place. It doesn’t claim to be able to predict hitherto unnoticed regularities in natural philosophy, in order to be able to explain them, then control them, then profit off of them.

Because of this, the scientists start of with the first step of theism as though it were a model: Hmm, God is good, supposedly. The world is not. God is all-powerful. The world still sucks. Therefore this theorem is flawed, there is no god. QED.

But Judaism and Christianity start from the other end: not from generalizations taken from careful and reproducible observations made under controlled conditions, but directly from revelation, claimed to be from God.

Rather then logical validity from axiom to premise, Judeo/Christian theology claims *moral* suasion: you’re in big trouble with God, bucko, and here’s why. And here’s what to do about it.

Or, another way to put it. Occam’s razor is very good for eliminating false positives, which is very good when you’re trying for a compact *mechanism*. But it doesn’t do squat when you’re trying to avoid false NEGATIVES. And the whole question of “is there a God” or “which religion is true” is the question of a false negative.

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