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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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To add on to @To_Mandalay's excellent points, no, most of us nonbelievers don't believe a bunch of Jesus' followers had a shared hallucination. This whole discussion is basically the "Lord, Lunatic, or Liar?" argument - the trilemma orginally formulated by C.S. Lewis that either Jesus was the Son of God, or else he was either a con-man or insane. (And Lewis and other Christian apologists then go on to write very convincingly about how unlikely it is that he was a liar or crazy, ergo, he must have actually been the Son of God.)

All of this assumes that eyewitness accounts from the 1st century should all be taken at face value. Hence you get the other popular argument, like @HlynkaCG's, pointing out that we have more documentary evidence of Jesus than of Hannibal Barca, etc. Okay, all true. But eyewitness accounts of supernatural events by large numbers of more or less credible people are very common throughout history. Either lots of miracles have happened (yet somehow never on camera since the advent of photography), many of which are not congruent with a Christian cosmology, or yes, a few people can convince themselves they really, really super-for-real experienced something, and many other people can then be convinced that really happened (and if they didn't experience it themselves at the time, they can convince themselves they did afterwards).

This doesn't make Jesus' followers stupid, liars, or crazy either. It just makes them like any other people throughout history who can convince themselves of almost anything through strong emotions and motivated reasoning. Do you literally believe anyone who claims they saw an angel or a demon? Do you think every person who claims to see an angel or demon either (a) saw an angel or demon; (b) is making it up; (c) is schizophrenic? Because I think there is an option D: people with strong enough religious beliefs, who are otherwise intelligent and rational, can convince themselves they have experienced something that didn't actually happen. I will compare, for example, Christian testimonials about personally experiencing God in various ways - ranging from the rather abstract "felt God speak to them" in their hearts to literal visions of going to heaven and talking to Jesus. I don't think these people are all lying or crazy. But if you talk to many other religions believers (particularly Muslims), you will hear very similar testimonials. So, either all religions really are one and God speaks equally to Christians and Muslims? (Despite the fact that neither Christians nor Muslims believe that's possible.) Or, the other explanation I typically get from both sides: our visions are real, theirs are Satan deceiving them.

This is why I don't think I need to "disprove" that Jesus' followers actually saw him rising to heaven, or walking around alive after he was crucified.

Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of most alleged instances of people saying God spoke to them. I guess I'm more impressed by the appearing to multiple people (eleven, then 500) simultaneously, which it isn't obvious to me how that could happen.

Edit: This did only allegedly happen, of course, but it is alleged by multiple seemingly independent, sincere, sources.

"Lunatic, liar, lord" also leaves out the option of "legend" - that the texts are not accurate retellings of history surrounding the historic figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

It's something you run into particularly with accounts of the lives of kings and hagiographies - a later writer might make up most of the biography of an earlier saint, but doing so would not necessarily be seen by the author or the contemporary audience as dishonest or fictional, particularly if it helped convey what they saw as the intended message or moral of their story. Illustrating the mercy of Saint x of y and how it should be emulated via a contributing a story of how he forgave an enemy was more important than whether that narrative accurately matches real life events, whether their details were available or not. History in the sense of attempting to research and reconstruct the past with as much accuracy to real life events as possible was not how writing about past figures and events was always understood, nor the objective of many authors.

Jesus was pretty close chronologically, though, and the people seemed to be sincere in their beliefs.