Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
and author of "Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand."
Posted on 12/04/2013 3:17:41 PM PST by servo1969
A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please.
If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual – at least not yet. Let me say that in a different way: if you have never given serious thought to the true identity of the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth then you are either a) suffering from severe intellectual hernia, or b) possessed of an intellect impaired by a fear of knowing the true answer to the question.
Let me begin by defending the assertion that Jesus Christ was the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth. 1) We divide time using the date of Jesus’ birth. 2) More books have been written about Jesus than anyone else in recorded history. Case closed. Now we can move on to the issue of fear and intellectual curiosity.
The options we are given for understanding the identity of Jesus are so limited that no one who is truly intelligent can be behaving rationally if he just avoids the question altogether. Take, for example, my friend who has lived 2/3 of a century on this planet without so much as attempting to work through the options. I don’t want you to be one of those irrational people so let’s get to work.
When addressing the question of Jesus’ identity, there are only four available options. Anyone who has ever read C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell knows that Jesus was either: 1) A legend, 2) a lunatic, 3) a liar, or 4) the Lord.
The idea that Jesus was merely a legend, as opposed to someone who actually lived, is simply not an option we can take seriously (at least not for long). Independent historical accounts, by that I mean accounts written by non-Christians, are enough to put this option to rest. Jesus is cited by 42 sources within 150 years of his life, and nine of those sources are non-Christian. By contrast, the Roman Emperor Tiberius is only mentioned by 10 sources. If you believe Tiberius existed, how can you not believe in a man who is cited by four times as many people and has had an immeasurably greater impact on history? You can believe that if you wish. But then you risk forfeiting any claim to be considered rational.
Nor is it rational to consider Jesus to have been a lunatic. Perhaps you could maintain that belief if you’ve never read the Bible. But how can a person claim to be educated if he’s never read the Bible?
World Magazine editor Marvin Olasky once entertained the notion that Jesus was a mere lunatic. But, then, in the early 1970s, as an atheist and a communist graduate student, he examined the words of Jesus for the first time. He was traveling to Russia on a ship and wanted to brush up on his Russian. But all he had with him to read (that just happened to be written in Russian) was a copy of the New Testament. And so he read. And he was transformed.
Marvin recognized immediately that the words of Jesus represent a profound level of moral understanding that rises above anything else that has ever been written. Read for yourself the words of Jesus. Then read the words of Charles Manson. Try to convince me that they are one in the same – merely two lunatics who mistakenly thought they were the Messiah. You have a right to that opinion. But you don’t have a right to be considered rational if you cannot detect a glaring difference between the teachings of Christ and Manson.
So, now only two options remain. And this is where the real trouble begins. If we call Jesus a liar (who falsely claimed to be God) then we cannot also call him a great moral teacher. One cannot be both. But many look at the final option of calling him Lord and panic. To go there means to accept belief in the supernatural. And surely that couldn’t be rational. Or could it?
Science has taught us a lot since the Bible was written. For one thing, we know that the universe had a beginning. It is expanding, it is finite, and it was not always here. Put simply, Carl Sagan was wrong. In fact, he was dead wrong. The cosmos is not all that is or was or that ever will be. It had a beginning. It is irrational to dismiss the obvious implications of this: that the universe was caused by a supernatural force existing outside of space and time.
People have to let go of the idea that the natural world is all there is because that is not where the science leads us. It instead leads us away from the philosophical commitment to only considering naturalistic explanations for the things we observe in the physical universe. This also leads us to one very important question: if a supernatural force was great enough to create the universe could the force or being not also reenter creation? And another related question: is the force or being responsible for creating life not also able to conquer death?
Arguably, the resurrection is a pretty small accomplishment in comparison with the creation of the universe. But that doesn’t mean it happened. The evidence must be judged on its own merits. I recommend that serious intellectuals start here.
Of course, you could just keep avoiding the question while judging others to be irrational. But there’s no avoiding the plank in your own eye.
Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
and author of "Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand."
Is there a condensed more concise version of his perspective on this topic? If not, I’ll just come back when I have more time.
Mike Adams is a syndicated columnist. That’s his column for this week. How much more concise do you need? A three-panel comic strip?
Strongly recommend reading “Religion on Trial,” by Craig A. Parton, wherein “a trial lawyer well schooled in the laws of admissible evidence brings insight and clarity to matters normally thought to be solely in the domain of philosophers and theologians.”
Yeah, that was a lot of words. I hate reading as much as you. Especially on a News and Opinion aggregation site like Freerepublic.com.
o_O
We don’t divide time using Jesus’ birth. We divide it using a convention begun by a forgotten monk who made a mistake.
We seize on that error, recognize that the time stake is essentially arbitrary (The Romans used the legendary founding of the city the same way) and then reference the agreed upon error tainted moment.
With regard to the legend, of those 42 sources, how many actually met the man.
The author of Matthew was not matthew, and probably didn’t meet Jesus.
The author of Mark was Paul’s secretary, and probably didn’t meet Jesus. It is likely that Paul never met Jesus.
The author of Luke was commissioned by one Theophilus, and probably didn’t meet Jesus.
So many of the ‘sources’ are not sources at all.
I like to point out the paradox of Jesus.
With great care and concern, his followers and scholars point out to great detail how he conformed to the prophecies of the Jewish Moshiach, Messiah. And yet, once in that role, he did little or nothing a Moshiach was supposed to do, but went off in his own direction.
While he created a new religion, the old one ignored him so much that over the years, several others rose up to claim the role of Moshiach. And some of them were far more persuasive to Jews that they were indeed the Moshiach.
However, this does not matter to Christians, because in their view, Jesus wrote his own rules and was not bound to Jewish traditions of what they thought he should be.
“...the obvious implications of this: that the universe was caused by a supernatural force existing outside of space and time”
Or it was caused by the nature of that which existed before, a different kind of natural process, not a supernatural force existing otherwise. See “A brief History of Time” by Hawking.
As for the supernatural force, I don’t get phone calls from it nor emails. Why would its rules be be “Jam yesterday and Jam tomorrow but never Jam today.”?
I have to object to using Charles Manson as the exemplar “lunatic”. I don’t dispute that Manson is a lunatic, but there have been who knows how many thousands of lunatics in this world? I, myself, have know several.
None of the ones I personally knew were vicious serial murderers, as Manson is.
Chose some peaceful loon, I don’t know who, but I didn’t write this piece. To choose Manson is just inflammatory and weakens the argument.
The entire article is a mere 1003 words - for most people, reading it would take about two minutes of their time. Meanwhile, you yourself have posted 778 words to FR, just since this morning. You're telling us that you can't spare another two minutes of your time, to read instead of write?
“We don’t divide time using Jesus’ birth. We divide it using a convention begun by a forgotten monk who made a mistake.”
It’s close enough for government work.
To me the paradox of Jesus is that noone recognizes that the prophecies were available for forgers to create a pretend Jesus, long after his putative life, and then pretend that their ability to reference various prophecies was somehow evidence of the reality of their scam.
So you think the ten sources met Tiberius?
Choose Thomas, the peaceful but crazy guy beaten to death by Downey California police officers.
I don’t know what sources he counts. I guessed that some of his Christian sources were the gospels.
That's as ignorant a statement as I've seen on FR.
Congratulations, you've shown yourself worthy of DU or KOS.
Well duu-uuhhh. Ya think? Wow, a history of the man by those who knew the man, what a concept.......
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