The Resurrection Story Revisited

You have come to me with the challenge to disprove the tale of the resurrection. I retort that I have no obligation to do so, simply because I do not accept it as knowledge. However, you do accept this claim as knowledge, yet you want me to accept the onus of disproving it, even before you offer a proof (which you still have not done). These facts alone betray your subjective bias in favor of the ideas in question. What justifies this bias? You do not say.

Anyhow, even though I do not accept the presumption that I bear some kind of onus to disprove the resurrection simply because I do not accept it as knowledge, I do offer you the tools by which I demonstrate why such a claim can be dismissed as invalid. I offered you the law of identity, and the basis on which it is founded, the very basis which you must take for granted yourself, even if your intention is to dispute or nullify it. You have basically acknowledged this fact in your subsequent correspondence.

Furthermore, not only have you failed to raise any enduring doubt or criticism against the absolute validity of the law of identity, you fail to offer an alternative basis on which to anchor any alternative course of reasoning which ostensively validates such claims as that of the resurrection of Christ. You want the conclusion, but you won't identify the conclusions roots. Why is that? You do not say.

Next I offer you two counter-challenges:

1. Demonstrate the power of faith, an alleged power which many Christians before you have proclaimed; and
2. Name one eyewitness to the resurrection. Instead of accepting these challenges, you weasel out of them with doubletalk. Doubletalk is expressive of the wish to have your cake, and to eat it, too. It is suspicious for a reason, just as it is true that, when there is smoke, there is usually fire.

You take the offensive by approaching me with your challenges. I show that I have no obligation to meet them, but do so anyway. I offer you challenges in return, and you evade them. But still you take issue with me for not accepting your god-belief claims.

What justifies this behavior?

Why do you want me to believe your claims so badly anyway? What is in it for you? If you say you are not motivated by selfish reasons, then by what reasons are you motivated? You obviously want me to believe your claims for some reason, don't you? Or, is it that you want me to believe them for no reason? Something has to give, Mr. ____, and this is it. You're going to have to start looking inward to yourself to answer these questions. I don't think you need to correspond with me to sort your own mind out. You need to start being honest with yourself. You either do believe, or you pretend to believe, what you claim you believe, for some reason. What is that reason? Why is it so obscured? What is it being hidden under the believer's reluctance to talk about method? Does his method not have an identity? Is it a method which he thinks I won't accept, and therefore decides not to embarrass himself by showing it to me anyway?

If I made the claim to you that a superwonderbeing named Blarko existed in the beyond world, and that Blarko was both a far away being as well as an up close and personal fuzzy pal, who could be your closest buddy, and do anything you ask in his name, what would you tell me? Would you tell me that you believe me, and that you think Blarko exists as well? Or, would you expect that I should produce some evidence for my claim before you believe it yourself? If you expect that I should produce some evidence, then why are you not willing to produce some evidence for your claims? If not, then why not believe right now, with all your soul and all your might, that Blarko exists, that Blarko is near, that Blarko does not need to be far? Blarko wants you to believe in Him. Blarko fashioned you out of cosmic silk, and lined you with consciousness. Blarko wants you to simply cozy on up to your lining, and He will meet you there, and you could both snuggle. Why don’t you accept this? Why do you resist this? Why are you afraid of such intimacy with that which is so far beyond your comprehension?

See, the table can be turned on you as well, if I wanted to pursue the arbitrary in contradistinction to your arbitrary. How would you fight it? How would you undo it? How would you dispel its illusions? If your own basis were just as arbitrary as that of your opponent, your position will fare no better than his, so long as he is consistent with his. But what guarantees consistency? Already, we need the law of identity, even in order to conjure up the arbitrary. Why? Because we can contrast what is real against what we imagine and project mentally. We do this all day long. I plan to go to bed later this evening; that is projecting into the future. I imagine that I will be tired, but only reality will confirm or disconfirm this projection.

The bottom line here is, however, is the fact that you cannot meet my challenge to demonstrate the supposed power of faith. Sadly, the same is true for every Christian I have ever met. Why do you suppose that is?

This is a sad but irrevocably devastating blow to all the apologetic mantras asserting eyewitness testimony to substantiate the claim of Jesus' resurrection. It's no wonder that apologists would rather trivialize this fact when it is pointed out to them.

But let's examine this a bit further, this time with a little more critical thinking.

On the reliability of the supposed witness of Jesus' death, Richard Carrier notes:

Read that one sentence again: "the accounts we have explicitly deny [any possibility that the soldiers could have checked Jesus' pulse, etc.] by asserting that Jesus was declared dead before he was even taken down" from the cross. Is it not possible that the diagnosis of Jesus' death was premature, even if we grant all the events recorded in the gospels as accurate? Certainly, it is very possible.

Carrier notes that misdiagnosis of death is not impossible:

If misdiagnosis of death is possible in modern times, in spite of our unique benefits made available by our advances in science and medicine, how much more possible was misdiagnosis in ancient times in primitive cultures lacking these benefits?

Carrier asks:

Indeed, how would any centurions know if Jesus had been drugged? I don't think they would have known. How can we be certain that the authors of the gospels were not mistaken about the substance or substances which were contained in the mysterious sponge? It could very well be the case that the oral tradition from which the authors elaborated their gospel stories was mistaken about the mysterious sponge, but it got recorded as history anyway. How do you know? How can you be so certain of this? Were you there? No. Why are you willing to reject the law of identity in favor of these tales?

In response to your social studies teacher, I say: So what?

If this is the course you want to take, you are making a statement about the dullness of your own mind, not about the supposed truth of the Bible's claims.

However, it could very well be that the gospel writers were religiously hypnotized people. Look at the antics you see in some charismatic churches today. I have watched believers gyrate themselves silly into deep, hypnotic-like trances as they shake and shuffle to organ music and a chorus of handclaps as they were summoned by the altar call. Some have even collapsed to the ground speaking gibberish (so-called "speaking in tongues") as their bodies wiggle violently on the ground. Some take such episodic fits as "evidence" of God's "moving" in that person's body and life. To me, this is evidence of the mind-game of the evangelical mind-control system of the Bible. Either way, it is mysticism through and through.

In the end, the appeal to martyrs is nothing but an appeal to emotions. It does not matter how many people die for the supposed truth of religious claims. The fact that someone allows himself to be martyred or kills himself does not make his beliefs true. Likewise, killing others does not make one's beliefs true. Indeed, if something is true, what can be gained by one's death? If it is true, it is already true, and one's death is irrelevant. And just as Christians have their lists of "martyred saints," so do other rival religions.

Again, so what?

People considering religious beliefs should not be concerned with how many people believed those things before them, or how many people allegedly "died for" those beliefs. Instead, they should consider whether or not those beliefs are true. These are two completely different matters, and today's believers would do well to abandon this fallacy-drenched approach to apologetics. It gets them nowhere and just makes themselves look all the more foolish.

Besides, exactly how does someone dying prove any one faith claim at the exclusion of another? That's the whole thing about faith claims: they are deliberately malleable so that they can be applied to virtually any context in some self-reaffirming manner which seems plausible to those who are already persuaded by them.

Furthermore, it may very well be the case that I think many books of antiquity contain some truth. If the content has some evidence in its favor, is internally consistent, and is consistent with previously validated knowledge (such as - at the very least! - the law of identity), then obviously some argument can be made in behalf of its alleged truth. The mystical content of the Bible and many other books of the antiquity do not meet these simple criteria.

Do you accept the claims about Saint Genevieve as wholly true? If not, why not?

(Readers may also want to read Michael A. Turton's The Christ of Doaist Alchemy for some enlightenment on the extremely well documented miracle claims of Chinese mystic adepts contemporaneous to 1st century Palestine. It is doubtful that today's Christian believers will regard these miracle stories as divinely authentic as well.)

Furthermore, in regard to the content of the books of antiquity to which I am willing to grant credibility, there is one more blatant error in any proposed analogy between that content and the content of supposed "holy books" like the Bible which apologists attempt to construct in defense of their Christian god-beliefs. And that error is: While I may grant that some of the content in those books of antiquity may be true, that content is not a primary, nor does it provide the foundation of my view of reality. Christians want to say that, if I accept something claimed to have been written by Aristotle or Plato as true, both of whom predated the time of Jesus, then I should also grant the supposed truth of the New Testament. Why? "Because we have so many copies!" they will claim. This apologetic approach attempts to carry itself on the seemingly innocuous commonality between the secular books of antiquity and the writings of the budding Christ cult. But where the secular books of antiquity are presented as the writings of mere men and no more, the writings of the Christ cult are presented under the pretense that they were authored by a supernatural, universe-creating, reality-ruling being, a God. And where some secular books of antiquity offer considered philosophical inquiry and sometimes discourse (so-called peripatetic or dialogical reasoning), the writings of the Christ cult offer hysteria and absurdity. Any attempt therefore to foist some analogy here is consequently weakened to a significant degree, indeed at the expense of the reputation of the apologist's intellect.

Furthermore, as George H. Smith points out in his classic Atheism: The Case Against God,

Even in methodology, if Jesus could be said to have taught according to some kind of method, the differences between the philosophers of antiquity and Jesus are, as Smith says, "striking."

You warn me that I not answer that their problem was "that they lacked objectivism and that was their weakness." But that indeed is the problem, in a nutshell. A you yourself state, Objectivism is not "the only way to be an atheist," and I agree. Atheism as such is not a single, universal code of belief; rather, it is the lack of a particular kind of belief, and therefore leaves open what one does affirm as positively true about reality. That is why I state above that I see this more as a matter of the primacy of existence vs. the primacy of consciousness view of reality rather than an issue of atheism vs. theism per se. I do not have the benefit of being able to review these men's respective homework while they were still professing atheists, homework which would lay bare what they considered fundamental, what they took for granted, which premises they assumed but did not examine. Certainly, the works that they wrote after they converted to the Christian god-belief is available, such as many of C. S. Lewis' books. But these do not help, for at this point we already know what they believe. The question is what did they believe before they became Christians, and how well fortified was that knowledge?

Besides, this approach to defending one's god-belief notions ignores the fact that all men start out as atheists. No man is born with a god-belief already pre-packaged in his mind; any argument to this end will commit the fallacy of the stolen concept and is therefore unsound. So conversion from atheism to Christianity is nothing novel; indeed, it is expected in the case of believers.

The point is, Dan, for every non-believer-to-believer story you can give me, I can match with a believer-to-non-believer story in return. On that account, we would be even, for all we've done is match testimony with opposing testimony. But personal stories do not substitute our need for principled reasoning, and that is why my website focuses on issues of fundamental philosophical import rather than one events in particular individuals' lives. These latter are certainly instructive, but they are ultimately meaningless without the other. And so far, you have offered no principles of fundamental philosophical importance which even hints at establishing the supposed truth of your god-beliefs.

These questions seem fairly straightforward to me, and should be direct enough for those who expect me to accept their faith claims to address. So far, however, no one's attempted to respond to them, including the fellow to whom I originally posed them. What are your thoughts in response to them?

You don't need to apologize for the time I've spent in corresponding with you. I do so at my own choice, and for any time it takes from other things in my life (like now, I should be retired by now this time of night), I have only myself to blame. Besides, you're a fun sparring partner, and you bring up a variety of points that are fun for me to consider. And I think you may be enjoying this as well, and therefore getting something personal out of our correspondence - not just from reading my responses to you, but primarily in your own thinking experiences on these matters. You want to defend a position in which you admittedly have some reservations, possibly even some doubts of your own. Perhaps you fear compromising your beliefs, such as your belief that Jesus rose from the dead, and you believe that charging out against those who do not accept the same beliefs as you will serve to strengthen your faith in those beliefs. Many have spent long, arduous and ultimately very unfulfilling lives struggling in such an endeavor, constantly trying to evade their own guilt for accepting a steady stream of irresolvably conflicting ideas. The Bible teaches that the believer's intellectual starting point is not God, but the believer's own fears (Prov. 1:7). So in order to believe you must first admit this irrational, fundamental fear which you accept as an irreducible primary, when in fact no emotion is fundamental and irreducibly primary. But this is the point that is never truly recognized so long as one's attempting to defend its schemes. And those schemes intertwined with internal conflicts are deliberately set up to keep your mind occupied, to busy the focus of your consciousness, not on the fundamentals, but on the peripherals, such as the alleged resurrection of Jesus. This ploy - a strategy of starting you off in a race with your shoelaces tied between your shoes, and training your eyes on some finish line far off in the distance so that you never look down and see that you're about to trip really hard - has proved so successful in Christianity that it has not only flourished in entire schools of thought (many of which are in complete, even bitter conflict with each other), it has also turned out to be a form of big business, if we can imagine such a perversion (and unfortunately, we have an enormous example so that we can imagine it). Soon as the shot is fired, you launch into your race. Your eyes are so focused on the finish line that you don't even realize that you've stumbled and fallen right on your face. You never let yourself doubt - or admit that you let yourself doubt - for a minute that the finish line actually exists and that you're going to reach it. If you begin to let yourself doubt that the finish line exists and that you're going to reach it, you're afraid that by doubting that it exists, it will fail to exist, and then you'll have to admit that it's always been a big illusion, and that now you've got mud on your face, not glory. Finally, this ultimately happens, but it's quite possible that by the time it does happen, your self-esteem will have been eroded to such immeasurable degrees that you hardly recognize yourself in the mirror, and don't care at all what you look like to others, so long as they provide some kind of assistance in reinforcing your delusions. It is to them that you are both attracted and repulsed simultaneously; you are compelled to "fellowship" with them by divine imperative, though you wouldn't care to be around any one of them if you gained the courage to liberate yourself from your own self-deceit and left all of the hokum behind. Your fellowship is thus not motivated by genuine love for the individuals, for the values they represent and which you admire, but out of fear, fear of enacting your genuine desire: to become independent of them, and to have them independent of you, in essence, to deal with one another as political equals. Instead, it is obedience to a ruler that keeps you in check.

If that is the life you seek, if that is the life you want to live, Christianity can pack it in like no other.

Well, I've responded to every one of your points, and I think I've given you lots to think about. Please note that I am considering to polish up our correspondence to post it up on my website for public viewing. Particularly my first response to you, which addresses many of the particulars of the resurrection story. If you do not want your name published, please let me know. Otherwise, I will interpret our continued correspondence as your sanction to keep your name attached as is.

Face it, Mr. ____. You have not proven the outstanding claim that Jesus rose from the dead. No apologist has. Only through the subterfuge of a mind-game and reliance on fallacy can you construe any argument as supplying the necessary proof of Jesus' resurrection. What's more, while challenging me to disprove the resurrection, you not only fail to prove it yourself, but fail to meet the counter-challenges I offered by return. And finally, your apologetic is utterly impotent when it comes to attacking the foundation of my view of reality, to which I appeal in my rejection of all claims to the miraculous and magical. If you don't accept my position as sound, that is your choice. But if you want to continue repeating the futility of your position in future correspondence, all I can say is:

Never mind.

Besides, as you yourself state at the beginning of your last note, you must be amply busy with your schoolwork and household chores.

If, however, you sincerely want to explore some of my ideas or the ideas raised in some of the sources I cited in my responses to you, I welcome your questions and comments.

Otherwise, I will consider this a settled issue.

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