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It’s only a mystery if you decide, based on faith, to accept the divinity of Christ, based on factors other than his behavior and statements. Otherwise it’s not mysterious at all: he acted like a normal human man because he was a normal human man.
I’m happy to admit there’s been nothing in my life that defied the observable laws of the universe to suggest the existence of any divinity. That is, if we exclude physically-possible-but-miraculous ‘everyone in that car should have been dead’ type of things, yeah I completely see your point.
But I’ve come around to thinking it is decidedly more likely that some unobservable spiritual forces exist and that Jews somehow play an important role, than it is that they’ve been doing their thing all this time because of literacy and nepotism. It’s not all just one big coincidence.
Okay, I too have come to believe that unobservable spiritual forces probably do exist. I have no idea how you get from that conclusion to “Yeshua Ben Nazareth, a 1st-century Galilean carpenter and mystic, was the literal incarnation of those spiritual forces, and therefore it is very important that I analyze his teachings and model my own life after those teachings to the best of my ability.” There is a whole world of other possible religions to believe in - including any of the various extant strains of Judaism, if you’re so convinced that the Jewish people specifically have some particular connection with, or part in, this spiritual realm!
A lot of people a lot smarter than me have written libraries full of books on this exact topic, but I'll give my best shot at a short answer. The story has verisimilitude. Maybe not every detail, but taken as a whole.
I do plenty of this, I just call it the Old Testament. And in terms of 'all religions are equally true - that is to say - equally false' it's just not very compelling to me because it means declaring myself to be more clever than virtually every single one of my ancestors for more than a thousand years. If Christianity is just a stupid hoax, then I have to reject my entire cultural history as stupid and my entire ancestry as a bunch of suckers. This was a source of consternation for me actually as an atheist who liked the West
I’m not necessarily suggesting that all religions have equivalent truth value - I’m merely asking why you believe that Christianity specifically has the highest truth value of any available religion. Certainly the accounts of at least the rough outline of Jesus’ life strike me as plausible - they have enough contemporary attestation that it’s reasonable to accept that the man existed and that he did and said many if not most of the things he’s reported to have done and said. However, if you doubt the part of the account that’s by far the most important, and also the most implausible - namely, the resurrection - then nearly all of it makes sense as simply a flattering account of a successful cult leader, promulgated by his most loyal disciples after his death.
Do you believe that, for example, the Koran is a less plausible account of Muhammad’s life than the New Testament is an account of Jesus’? What about the Doctrine and Covenant’s account of Joseph Smith’s life and sayings? I daresay that if your number one concern is verisimilitude, you’re better off being a Muslim or a Mormon, since the latter two can muster an even greater and more historically well-attested claim to accurate representation of their central figure.
I agree that this poses a very serious problem, but I think there are other conclusions one can reach which are considerably less damning and dismissive. I have written before about how the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe in many ways strongly resembles the spread of what we call “wokeness” or “globalist liberal progressivism” today. It was a religion spread by missionaries who promised rulers and influential political/cultural leaders access to a wide network of financial and political interdependence and power. These rulers adopted the ideology out of cynical calculations, and then “converted” the rank-and-file members of their society to a highly attenuated and syncretized version of the religion which, at least at first, allowed those people wide latitude to continue to privately practice many aspects of their previous native religions.
Eventually, the descendants of those initial cynical/partial converts were acculturated into sincerely believing the syncretized version of the religion; they didn’t notice the manifold contradictions between, on the one hand, the core text of the religion, and on the other hand, the profoundly Germanicized version they were actually practicing. The philosophy expressed by Jesus does not seem to countenance the construction of lavish and glorious cathedrals, or any of the other elements of medieval European civilization which coexisted with a surface-level profession of Christianity. That’s because they were never really fully bought into the Eastern, magist, radically millenarian core of Christianity to begin with; to the extent that Jesus’ message contradicted the deeper impulses of the European bio-spirit, the Christian parts were superseded by the European syncretization. It’s no coincidence that only by openly reconciling Christianity with earlier Greco-Roman paganism did Europeans truly transcend the limitations of the source material.
I think I've sprinkled several answers to this already but my apologies if they weren't clear. Here is a condensed list:
Your point is very well taken, I just brought this up myself in a similar thread. Mohammed was definitely a guy who in all likelihood said the things he did, same as Joseph Smith. But neither has any verisimilitude. How can Jesus just be an important prophet in Islam when his whole shtick was 'i am not just an important prophet'? And why would God send angels and gold tablets to one guy's backyard with the message 'ladies, if you sleep with this man, straight to heaven'
Yeah I'll entertain that premise! Hell I'll even go a step further and say Christianity has inadvertently enabled "wokeness" every step of the way for both millennia. But at least at first most (all?) of Christianity's changes on our ancestor's practices were genuinely positive. We did do human sacrifice. We did have sex cults. We did worship rocks and trees. Not swift.
Jesus doesn't hate beautiful things. We could have an entire conversation about this though if you're interested, would be fascinating
We were a bunch of mudpeople who barely bothered to invent an alphabet before Christianity. Yes, we had advanced metallurgy, agriculture, civil order, etc. But where were our poems, our philosophical treatises? Our monuments and great works? We were going nowhere fast. We were practically pre-historic before the Romans stumbled on us. If it's no coincidence that Europe rose to such heights as to conquer the globe only because of the syncretism you're describing, perhaps that was precisely what God intended for us.
I think that this is another example of cynical syncretism; Muhammad did not want to alienate potential converts who had been exposed to Christianity, of whom there were many in the region by that time. By paying that baseline level of respect to Jesus, Islam could piggyback on Christ’s message/legacy and incorporate it into the framework of Islam. To rescue things theologically, one could believe that Jesus was exaggerating his own divinity and power at the time in order to ensure that his message was received and promulgated as effectively as possible given the religious and cultural milieu he was in at the time.
The history of early Mormonism is definitely more complicated than that. I fully agree with you that the beginnings of the church are highly inauspicious; Smith was at best a fabulist and had that same narcissistic and grandiose cult leader personality I earlier attributed to Jesus. Much of the Doctrine and Covenants is simply a catalogue of various petty spats and disputes he had with his followers, many of whom were embarrassingly naïve. However, the fact that a church with such an unpromising origin could, within the span of less than 200 years, grow into one of the most successful and prosperous religious movements of all time, with some of the happiest, most well-adjusted, most affluent, and most fertile adherents of any extant religion, suggests that perhaps Smith truly was a vessel - however imperfect - for a genuine divinely-inspired message. (Perhaps that message is that European-descended people need to continue to further syncretize and shape Christianity in order to bring it more in sync with our natural instincts and with our modern needs.)
I’m somewhat more restrained in my praise of the effects of Christianization on European peoples, but I will start by acknowledging the ways in which you’re correct. Christianity did indeed put an end to the catastrophic cycles of interpersonal revenge violence which had fractured pagan European society. It ended the practice of enslaving fellow Europeans. It brought pagans within the fold of that network of commerce, political centralization, learning, and scholasticism which I mentioned earlier. It increased fellow-feeling between disparate European tribal groups - at least, that is, after the slaughter and subjugation of the people who resisted conversion was finally concluded, with the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades.
Still, I think you’re far too flippant when you say that they “worshipped rocks and trees”. It’s more accurate to say that they believed that real spiritual beings dwelled within nature, and that it was possible to cultivate a mutually-respectful and beneficial relationship with those spirits. The sacred groves which were a mainstay of all Indo-European-derived pagan traditions were seen as places wherein people could commune with the divine - not with the trees themselves, but with the gods whose power channeled through them. They were places of contemplation and supplication. The burning and destruction of sacred groves by Christian missionaries was a grotesque and desecrative act.
As for human sacrifice, this is a topic about which at some point I want to do a real deep dive and learn what that actually looked like, how the people conceived of what they were doing, etc. Most importantly, I want to understand what sort of people were being sacrificed. I can easily imagine that what we call “human sacrifice” was essentially functionally equivalent to how the death penalty is used today. Underneath all the spiritual woo, perhaps it was just a way to justify purging the most undesirable individuals from society. Perhaps the people sacrificed were criminals, or prisoners of war, or profoundly mentally ill - schizophrenic, or psychopathic - or were very sick in some other way, or otherwise a massive burden or pain on the ass to everyone else. Better to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, and thereby redeem some value and significance and collective catharsis from their deaths, than to just quietly let someone take them behind the woodshed and strangle them to death so we could all be rid of them. I genuinely don’t know enough about the mechanics, the prevalence, and the contemporary justifications for the practice for me to cast informed judgment on it. There are tons of people living among us today whom I wouldn’t mind seeing burnt on a pyre or cast into a peat bog, so human sacrifice doesn’t really freak me out in the way that it seems to do for most people.
Your general complaints about the lack of literacy, philosophy, and poetry are valid, but you also need to take into account the extent to which a lot of pre-Christian culture was just forcefully destroyed by Christians and lost forever. Germanic pagans did build temples, and the Christians burnt them down or turned them into churches. Norse people did have an alphabet, and did have a thriving poetic tradition, which was later codified into the Sagas and the Eddas. I am not suggesting that pagan European society, as it existed before Christianity, was the sort of civilization that could have landed a man on the Moon. For that, integration into a more sophisticated, more centralized, more urbanized civilizational structure was indeed necessary; for that, I am thankful to Christianity, although I question the extent to which I should credit the tenets of Christianity specifically, or whether I should recognize Christianity as having inherited the Imperium from Rome, and as having been simply one step further in the still-ongoing apotheosis of Western society, a process which will require us at some point in the near future to move on from Christianity or syncretize it even further into something new and workable for the space-faring age.
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You have a lot more information than they do. You can compare Christianity's history of claimed miracles to Islam's or asian religions, and notice they're about as well attested. You can compare the modern physical explanation for the history of evolution, nature, and the cosmos to the history of Christianity (and Islam)'s supposedly divinely inspired claims. You can observe the structural, geographical, and political influences on the evolution of metaphysical claims and 'divinely inspired' doctrine. You can compare those to the natural history of things like physics, chemistry, biology. What would a prayer-effect-on-survival RCT find? Are the divine inspirations claimed by members of other christian sects or Islam fake, even though they're roughly as passionate as those of the members of your sect?
Sometimes things happen that people can't explain and call them miracles. Although I'll re-concede as before I have absolutely no evidence or reason to believe in physically impossible things like limbs regrowing, I'm humble enough to kind of throw up my hands and admit I don't know how it all works.
2000 years later we're still not any closer to knowing why there's something rather than nothing
Great point! I used to as an atheist, and still do, find it a compelling argument that for example it would be extremely odd if everyone in indonesia believed dinosaurs died by meteor while everyone in pakistan believe they died from climate change and everyone in thailand believed it was something else. But this is one that faithful people are probably even quicker to acknowledge than atheists: "yeah, human beings fuck things up, what else is new," essentially. Or another example, there are 100 different translations and different scriptures left in and out etc - very convincing to me as an atheist that it had to all be bullshit. Faithful people just study all the different things and say "ah there people go screwing things up again"
I'm not gonna throw the whole baby out with the bathwater, but I don't really trust a lot of that stuff right now. Again not meaning molecules or gravity or anything like that.
This is a good example of my answer to the last question: I don't care because I don't trust it. Googling 'study on does prayer work' pulls up literally a million results and we know we could find plenty both for and against. I also know I've prayed for a loved one to get better and they did for seemingly no reason. And as long as you're not overdoing it, it can't hurt.
I'm not a member of any sect, in keeping with my general 'don't trust things just because someone says so' goal, but answering your question in the spirit in which it was asked, I feel comfortable saying the more recent stuff like Islam and LDS are not as believable as the older stuff, and that some beliefs in general are more plausible than others (Scientology comes to mind)
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Presumably though then you must admit, that if you had been born into a different culture, you would be using exactly the same logic to believe in Shintoism or Buddhism or Hinduism etc? Somebody's ancestors were comparative suckers if only one is true.
It's not a universizable system in other words.
Quite happily yes! Although there's the added convenient coincidence that Christianity is the only truly global religion thanks to the roman empire and colonialism
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