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.
Oh you poor poor person.
The exact date of Jesus’ birth as s not recorded. So, ultimately, it is not important. But does not knowing the exact date or day render celebration of that day impossible?
I would opine that it does not. We have that day/date to celebrate an event, the birth of the Savior of the world.
Good luck shopping at Wal-Mart for all your winter solstice gifts.
You can’t fool me. It’s turtles all the way down.
I do doubt ... that the universe "willed itself into existence", as suggested by Steven Hawking.
Were they killed for a scam? Or were they also invented?
We just don’t have a lot of evidence. Peter’s corpse is not available to us, nor is that of Paul. Forensics are pretty much out, and Roman justice of the time is mostly not documented. How old is the oldest actual scripture document reporting the New Testament? As the distance increases from the time of the events it reports, it is less useful as evidence.
At least with Augustus or Tiberius we get some statues.
Enjoy your celebration, but please don’t imagine that the world revolves around your celebration.
Merry Christmas!
What caused that which existed before?
Does that question apply to G-d too?
No.
God has existed always.
It’s easier to accept that as an article of faith, one of the Great Mysteries, than to believe the universe willed itself into existence using the laws of gravity.
http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html
Depending on texts that date from AD 200 texts would be like having no documents of the American Revolution that were produced until 1950.
Or the Universe has existed always, and it changed into its current form by natural law that we can perhaps understand.
“If you don’t doubt, then you are not thinking. Faith is what happens when you don’t doubt.”
No, that isn’t what faith is, at least not to Christians. Faith is believing in spite of room for doubt, not choosing to ignore doubts. Faith can be informed by reason, but isn’t based on reason alone, so doubts which may arise using a purely rational approach are not insurmountable obstacles to faith.
In fact, everyone, even those who believe they are purely rational, still put faith in some things. They just do not realize it, or refuse to admit it, so they can keep up their personal conceit of rationalism. So, since we all have faith, we obviously cannot use your definition of faith, or we would have to conclude that nobody can think.
I have no illusion of the world revolving around anything Godly. You stand as evidence. You use the holiday name Christmas (Christ Mass) and then deny Christ. Good luck with that.
“Or the Universe has existed always...”
Nope, no luck with that approach if you are trying to be rational. It’s been proven to be mathematically impossible to have an eternal universe that is also expanding, as we have observed this universe to be:
So, you’re saying that we can’t trust the textbooks of today about what happened 200 years ago?
To me the paradox of Jesus is that, on the one hand we are told that God so loved the world...,etc., etc., whose love is embodied in Jesus. And on the other hand, Jesus is going to judge some day and consign the vast majority of humanity to a never ending torture, the likes of which would horrify Torquemada.
Its ...Religion.....its based on FAITH.
For what its worth...I believe it.
Would you rather have a God who let evil go unpunished?
No, I would prefer a God who would, if he decided punishments were necessary, provide punishments that fit the crime. If a father spanked his child for hours on end, we would agree that father is a monster. Yet we are told to believe that a infinitely loving God is going to punish most of the people who ever lived for the crime of failing to believe in Jesus. The fact that huge numbers of people down through history never heard of Jesus and therefore had no opportunity to believe doesn’t matter.
Is failing to believe in Jesus really a crime that deserves everlasting teeth-grinding pain?
Oh, yeah. And...
(Tagline)
;<)
Jesus is the Lord...Period. Concise enough?
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