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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   26193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Cultural Christianity isn’t a real thing. You don’t go around saying ‘Christianity may not be true but it’s closer than anything else’. No, you say ‘Jesus was God who died for your sins and this is what he wants you to do’. Nobody cares about the first statement.

This reminds me of Lewis: either Christ was a liar, a madman, or the Son of God.

The obviously false trilemma.

Lewis is good, but, left out the obvious 4th choice: decades after Jesus's death early Christians exaggerated his works and words to the point of making them miracles and Jesus God on Earth. Those first few decades are spotty in terms of written accounts. These were oral recitations that eventually were written down after a few decades. This view predates Lewis by centuries and there's no way he honestly isn't aware of it. Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson belived some variation of that. This false trilemma isn't Lewis' greatest moment of intellectual integrity.

Seems really odd all of his disciples decided to be killed in a variety of gruesome ways because of some miracles that they never actually witnessed

From "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?" by Scott Alexander:

One common apologetics tactic is the argument from the historicity of Christ and the Apostles. That is, the Apostles said they saw the Resurrection of Christ, and it would take quite a conspiracy to make twelve different people lie - not to mention to make them stick to the lie even after Christianity became unpopular and it became clear they would be persecuted or even die for their faith. If the Apostles had been making the story of the Resurrection up, there were ample opportunities for them to say so. Yet either they never did, or it never made it into the tradition.

...

One way to knock down this argument is to find a case of twelve people who said they saw something miraculous, didn't recant despite persecution and strong self-interested reasons to do so - and yet everyone, atheist and orthodox Christian alike, agree they were wrong. Ever since I left Utah I've been slowly making my way through The Mormon People, and I was very excited to find a case of exactly that.

If you're not familiar with Mormonism, it was founded in the 1820s by an American prophet named Joseph Smith, who claimed that an angel led him to a series of golden tablets written in hieroglyphics which, when translated by means of a magic stone, contained various revelations. He attracted various followers despite persecution and today there are over ten million Mormons who believe the insights he took from these tablets and various other angelic encounters form a new testament of the Bible called The Book of Mormon.

During Smith's lifetime, there was obviously a lot of curiosity over whether his story about angels and golden tablets and hieroglyphics was true. This was compounded by his insistence that he had given the golden tablets back to the angel when he was done translating them and so couldn't produce the originals for scholarly review anymore.

However, Smith was able to produce eleven witnesses (besides himself, for a total of twelve) for his story. Three witnesses claimed to have seen the angel holding the plates and heard the Voice of God tell them Smith's story was true... Eight others saw the plates later, and although they did not encounter God or any angels, they confirmed that there were a set of mysterious golden tablets with hieroglyphics on them... All eleven signed official legal statements swearing their testimony, which were later incorporated into printed editions of the Book of Mormon.

What are we to make of this?

One obvious possibility is that Smith made some fake tablets and showed them off to few enough people for a brief enough time that the fake couldn't be investigated closely. I don't like this explanation for two reasons. The first is that it would be really hard for a dirt-poor farmer to construct a book seemingly constructed of gold tablets inscribed with hieroglyphics. He would need the cooperation of a couple of professionals, and he would have to rely on them keeping quiet. Even moving the tablets - they were said to have weighed several hundred pounds - would have been a production. No goldsmith or wealthy backer has ever come forward claiming a part in it, nor have any likely candidates been proposed. And second of all, this is less parsimonious than most alternative hypotheses. It would require Smith to be pushing two totally different plots at the same time - whatever plot got the first group to testify to angels and divine voices, and the plot to fake a golden book for the second group.

A second possibility is that Smith found a bunch of people who were willing to lie for him. But this suffers from the same problem that the "the Apostles lied" theory does. Several of the witnesses later had very public fallings-out with Joseph Smith and the incipient Mormon Church. Oliver Cowdery, one of the three who saw the angel, got into a fight with Joseph Smith over polygamy and some money matters and got excommunicated from Mormonism. He ended up moving to Ohio, becoming a Methodist, and declaring that he was "ashamed of his connection with Mormonism". However, he always stuck to his story about seeing the angel and the Golden Plates, even when, according to Wikipedia, "that confession cost him the editorship of a newspaper".

David Whitmer, another of the three witnesses to the angel, also got in a spat with Joseph Smith and was part of a coup attempt in the Mormon church to expel Joseph Smith as leader and replace him with himself. Smith excommunicated him and then sent a militia to harass him and his family; eventually he was forced to leave the state. Although he denounced Smith for the rest of his life, he continued to swear that he had seen the angel and the golden plates.

Further, the Mormons were getting persecuted ad nauseum by this point. On three different occasions, Mormon towns were burnt, the Mormons lost their land, and a bunch of Mormons were killed or jailed. Joseph Smith himself was killed by an angry mob. Eventually the Mormons got so sick and afraid that they all packed up and fled to Utah, which as anyone who's seen Utah knows requires a special level of desperation.

This presents a serious problem for the Christian apologists, at least if they're not Mormon. Their argument is that there's no way twelve people would simultaneously hallucinate a mystical experience, and although twelve people might agree to lie about the mystical experience there's no way they would all keep that lie throughout decades of church politics and terrible persecution. But now they're faced with a dilemma. Either they have to throw out the argument that a dozen people testifying to something and holding to it means it definitely happened, or they all have to convert to Mormonism.

So what did happen with all those witnesses to Mormonism? Well, there are a few helpful hints. All of them were strongly predisposed in Smith's favor to begin with. Some were his family members. All had a background in the sort of folk mysticism that was common in America at the time.

(notice none of this differentiates it from the Jesus case; those who saw the resurrected Jesus were his disciples, some were members of his family such as his brother James, and they were all steeped in the folk mysticism that was common in Palestine at the time. But I digress)

A number of the Mormon witnesses sort of change their stories in weird ways. One, Martin Harris, supposedly admitted later he saw the plate not with his earthly eyes but with his "eyes of faith", and a neighbor said he "never claimed to have seen the plates with his natural eyes, only spiritual vision". Then Harris totally denied ever saying this and said they were definitely literally real in every possible way. Another witness is supposedly on the record as saying the angel had "no form or shape" and was more of a "vague impression", although again he's also on the much more official record as totally denying this and saying it was all definitely really real. Apparently in contradiction to these, there is a record of one witness insisting he hefted the (quite heavy) plates and held them on his knees and felt the weight and so on.

The Jesus story also has some weird incongruities. In many cases, the disciples originally thought they were talking to someone else (a gardener, a traveler on the road), and later "realize" it is Jesus. Jesus tells Mary not to touch him, suggesting some kind of belief he might be a vision or apparition, but then Thomas very specifically does touch him, suggesting an attempt to dispel this belief. Although the Christ story admittedly does not have the sort of guarded-then-retracted attempts by the witnesses to say maybe it was really spiritual after all, we also have only about a thousandth as much material in the Jesus case as in the Joseph Smith case, and we totally lack any independent testimony from the Apostles involved let alone any evidence that they were ever questioned harshly by skeptics or had things they mentioned to their neighbors come back to haunt them.

Overall I think the Mormon experience proves (if you're not Mormon!) that the sort of psychological forces surrounding mystical experiences can be more complicated than we naively expect. We wouldn't expect twelve witnesses to swear up and down that they saw angels and magical golden plates and so on, and then stick to the story despite a host of opportunities to profit by denying it - and yet if we are to continue denying Mormonism we must admit exactly that. And coming to that conclusion should make us update our probabilities in the case of the Apostles as well.

Interesting, I never knew of this blog post of Scott’s but I’m not sure I find Mormonism all that close of an analogous case. The persecution of early Mormon’s was gentle by comparison to what early Christian’s went through. How many of those witnesses were crucified? Fed to lions? Oh a few villages got burned and then they decided to all run away and give up on preaching? Hmmmmmm

What a writer he was.

I don't think decades works. Paul's one of the major authors, and he was a Christian within a few years of Jesus' death. How do you think Paul would have come to believe Jesus was God?

I don’t find this persuasive. This argument is that there was in fact a different unknowable Jesus. Perhaps. But Lewis is talking about the Jesus of the Bible. He is right with respect to that person (regardless of whether that person was real).

Which is Jesus is a liar restated (the lies would be in the exaggerations of his followers putting his claims of being the Son of God into his mouth after the fact).

It’s often forgotten that the original context for this argument wasn’t targeted at atheists, but cultural Christians inclined to Jesusism, and viewing Jesus as a moral teacher rather than a divine figure:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

You should notice that his point has a lot in common with the ‘slave morality’ point that following the moral dictates is incredibly foolish if there’s no eternal reward: give away all your possessions? Deny yourself? Be martyred? Such lunacy!

So he’s trying to tell people who believe in Jesus’ morals but not Christianity that Jesus’ morals only make sense if Christianity is true, Jesus was divine with a divine message of rewards for those who follow him. Otherwise, it’s total lunacy, or a complete lie.

Eh, the fourth option is that Saul of Tarsus was the liar who corrupted the word of Jesus to further his own interests and strike the killing blow in his persecution of the nascent Christians by twisting the words of their Great Teacher until they became the antithesis of what Jesus truly wished to convey.

Remember, Saul never met the physical Jesus before his crucifixion. In fact in Matthew 24:27 Jesus warns his followers against believing anyone who says they saw Jesus in the wilderness or in a secluded place after he is crucified. And what did Darth Saul do to ingratiate himself with the Christians? Yep, he claimed to "miraculously" see Jesus first in the wilderness (road to Damascus) and then in a secluded place (the Jerusalem Jail where he was held captive).

In the end Saul was successful beyond his wildest dreams when he first set out to persecute the Christians. Not only did he manage to completely pervert the religion of Jesus but like a cuckoo bird he also successfully placed himself into the religion as one of the greatest "followers" of Christ with many billions of people venerating him in the two millennia since he died; he even had the gall to "correct" Peter (Galatians 2:11), the real true greatest follower of Jesus. And worst of all this veneration still continues to this day with no sign of stopping!

TLDR: Christianity got cucked by Saul and still isn't willing to accept what really happened.

The others on the road heard the voice of Saul.

This also does a pretty awful job trying to account for the enormous effort he put into spreading Christianity throughout the world. Not to mention undergoing imprisonments and a host of other ills, culminating, if the tradition is to be believed, in his martyrdom. I can't take this very seriously.

TLDR: Christianity got cucked by Saul and still isn't willing to accept what really happened.

Well, I mean, how did that work out for him? Did he laugh all the way to the bank? Retire in a villa overlooking Lake Albano?

Well, I mean, how did that work out for him? Did he laugh all the way to the bank? Retire in a villa overlooking Lake Albano?

Nah, he just successfully placed himself into the religion he had nothing do with until well after Christ's death as one of the most venerated saints with his legacy still going extremely strong today everywhere there is any Christianity. Sure he got executed for his beliefs but the long term remembrance he got with at least half of all humans alive today having heard of him (with most having a positive valence) far outweighs merely living out your life in some villa overlooking Lake Albano only to be forgotten by everyone by the year 250 AD.

The man died for his beliefs, and wrote about them extremely eloquently as he awaited his execution. The worst charge that could be leveled against Paul is that he was mistaken. And you know, generally speaking, I don't think he was.

For sure. I bet he couldn't even feel the pain of suffocating to death under his own weight due to the warm feeling of satisfaction he got from a legacy he didn't have any inclination of at the time.

Now I've been under the impression he was beheaded (as he was a citizen) but yes your point stands.

In what way did Paul twist Jesus' words or teachings? What is the actual perversion?

For example, the idea of salvation through grace isn't really something Jesus really talked much about himself, that's mostly a creation of post Gospel books.

When Jesus talked about getting into heaven, he was pretty consistently telling people to do specific things to make it in: sell all your possessions, give up your life to follow him, help the poor.

The idea that just believing in him would guarantee you a place in heaven regardless of your actions was basically all added after.

Are you sure? Jesus constantly recommends moral action, but I'd say that even in the synoptics, there seems to be an awareness that this by itself is insufficient? Take, for instance Matthew 19:16-27 (which is triple tradition, cf. Mark 10:17-31, Luke 17:18-30). It seems as though in those passages Jesus presents an impossibly difficult moral demand, the disciples wonder at how salvation may be possible, and Jesus says that it comes only through the action of God. He then goes on to reassure them that everyone who has followed him will be saved.

I find it hard to fit a passage like that into a model that says that Jesus was preaching salvation through good works. Jesus evidently thinks that good works are good, and that people should do them, but they do not seem to be sufficient for him. Some divine action seems to be necessary to bridge the gap between human moral effort and salvation.

See also passages like Luke 7:36-49, in which Jesus appears to suggest that a sinful woman has been forgiven on the basis of her great faith, rather than because of any meritorious work of righteousness in the world.

This story also seems reminiscent of the Anointing at Bethany (Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9), where the disciples protest at an extravagant sign of faith on the basis that the money could have been more efficiently allocated to the poor. Jesus chastises them and seems to approve of the woman's display of faith. (Take that, effective altruists?) Again it seems like for Jesus there is more to righteousness or salvation than the corporal works of mercy.

You may not count the epilogue to Mark as original to the gospel, and you may discount post-Resurrection appearances, but Mark 16:16 is also a statement directly attributed to Jesus saying that those who believe will be saved. You might also consider Matthew 10:8 ("You received without payment; give without payment") as relevant to Jesus' understanding of how divine favour operates?

It's true that in the synoptics Jesus never says in so many words "salvation is by grace", but there is enough, I think, to say that for Jesus salvation is something that involves both a kind of unilateral divine action, reaching out to sinful humankind, and the faithful human response to that action. The language of grace appears elsewhere. But I think it's plausible enough to see that language as an attempt to faithfully articulate a real feature of the teachings and actions of Jesus in his life.

Perhaps you're excepting John, but it's pretty clear in John.

Jesus also forgives sins in the gospels.

I don't think Jesus actually intended every person to do every thing he spoke of. For example, he probably didn't intend for everyone to be gauging out their eyes.

Perhaps you're excepting John, but it's pretty clear in John.

I do think John deviates a bit from the other three to a suspicious extent, but what specifically are you talking about? I poked around in there but I didn't see anything that was particularly clear on salvation through grace.

Jesus also forgives sins in the gospels.

Sure, but there's a big difference between "I forgive this particular act" and "mere belief in me automatically erases all acts"

I don't think Jesus actually intended every person to do every thing he spoke of. For example, he probably didn't intend for everyone to be gauging out their eyes.

Sure, maybe he's being metaphorical with some of this, but "he actually meant this unrelated and almost directly contradictory thing" should at least raise some eyebrows.

"And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell." probably doesn't mean "don't worry about it, your sins don't matter as long as you believe"

I do think John deviates a bit from the other three to a suspicious extent, but what specifically are you talking about? I poked around in there but I didn't see anything that was particularly clear on salvation through grace.

It's pretty clear that we're saved by the father drawing us (see e.g. John 6:46 and surrounding), and it's by belief (same area, also John 3:16).

Sure, but there's a big difference between "I forgive this particular act" and "mere belief in me automatically erases all acts"

See the above reference in John. But no, it wasn't individual acts, but statements in general. See, e.g. Matthew 9:2.

Sure, maybe he's being metaphorical with some of this, but "he actually meant this unrelated and almost directly contradictory thing" should at least raise some eyebrows.

What unrelated and almost directly contradictory things are you thinking of?

probably doesn't mean "don't worry about it, your sins don't matter as long as you believe"

Correct, it doesn't. Sin's an awfully serious thing. Antinomianism is far too prevalent in modern lay Protestantism. We should certainly not be sinning more that grace may abound.

Edit: Should be John 6:44.

It's pretty clear that we're saved by the father drawing us (see e.g. John 6:46 and surrounding), and it's by belief (same area, also John 3:16).

This is a good point, and I'm a little annoyed at myself for forgetting arguably the most quoted bible verse.

I'll note that John kind of goes off in a very different direction than the rest of the Gospels and that casts some suspicion, but that inevitably descends into a haze of "what did Jesus actually say/do" that gets us nowhere. I'm not nearly a good enough theological scholar to usefully continue here, I'm afraid.

I appreciate the discussion!

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From what I understand, Christianity - at least what we understand now by it - more or less is what Saul created. It's like saying Homer has "cucked" the Iliad - if there were some version of Iliad that is so much better than Homer's and more "true", we certainly don't have it, so what choice is there?

But where do you think Saul got that Christianity from?

There were the apostles, who knew Jesus himself, and Saul confirmed with them that what he was saying was accurate. (See Galatians 2.)

Where Muhammad got Islam from? Where Siddhartha Gautama got Buddhism from?

Saul confirmed with them that what he was saying was accurate

I'm sure he did, otherwise we'd know nothing about him but instead would know about some other guy that did.

Where Muhammad got Islam from? Where Siddhartha Gautama got Buddhism from?

Do you really think that those three figures were gathering knowledge in the same way? That doesn't seem terribly likely to me. They seem pretty different in how they go about things.

I'm sure he did, otherwise we'd know nothing about him but instead would know about some other guy that did.

I don't know what you're trying to get at there, but I don't see how it interacts with the purpose that I mentioned it for: to indicate that Christianity is not just Pauline, but accurately conforms to what the direct followers of Jesus believes.

Do you really think that those three figures were gathering knowledge in the same way?

No, probably not - each religion's foundation it a rare and complex event which surely has its own peculiarities. My point is rather that the founding of the religion traceable to a person is not some exceptional event - it happens and it's possible. My other point is that foundational concepts of Christianity - such as the sacrifice and the resurrection of Jesus - originated with Saul and thus essentially he couldn't "corrupt" the "true" Christianity any more than Homer could "corrupt" the "true" Iliad.

What do you think the early Christians were even doing, if they didn't think there was a resurrection?

If you look at the things say he received, it's clearly more than you're positing.

You have a framing here that feels like it's intended to allow you to be pretty dismissive, and it just doesn't feel very plausible to me.

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Correction: Saul says that Saul confirmed with them that what he was saying was accurate. Galatians was written by Saul if the accounts are to be believed.

And it is believed Pauline by basically all scholars. You think he was just being a devious liar in that?

Anyway, Acts also confirms contact with the disciples of Jesus.

No, I'm saying that Saul saying that Saul confirmed with James etc. that what he was teaching was correct doesn't tell us much because of course he would say that.

Only if you think him a devious liar, which, it seems, you do.

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Eh, both Jesus and Saul believed that the end of days was supposed to happen soon. I wonder how those early Christians reacted when Jerusalem was razed to the ground and the world kept on ticking.

Presumably they felt pretty vindicated.

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