Truth
Why Christianity Must be True!
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, January 22, 2001
Polemical Trickery
A Christian agony aunt on the web, (let’s call him Ima Phibber), answers questions sent in by naïve Christians plagued by skeptics’ assertions. Inevitably his advice to his simple charges is to demand proof from the skeptic. That is pretty rich from people who do not need any proof of their own fancies and untruthful assertions. Ask them for proof that Jesus was the first fruits of the dead and you will get the same old tired citations of dubious New Testament passages. On the basis of the bible, the world was flooded entirely except for the tip of mount Ararat! Does anyone seriously believe this nowadays? Think about it. If this is manifestly untrue, why should anything else in this old book of fairy tales be true? Yet, the Christian Auntie tells you to demand archaeological or historical evidence not just speculation.
A good example is at the heart of many of these pages. An innocent wrote asking how he could deal with a nasty atheist who said God was invented to control people. The answer (all emphases in the original):
First, ask him to prove it! Ask him to give you some evidence! There is no evidence… only speculation… If he gives you some more theory, ask for historical evidence! Ask for something from archeology or history, not just a speculative possibility!
What could be more speculative than Christianity, yet our Christian Auntie tells us the critics of Christianity are speculating. On the face of it, these Christian gurus do not understand scientific method, but they do and try to use it against scientists and historians. Science works by making hypotheses, making deductions from them then testing the truth of the deductions. Dishonest Christian evangelists claim that this proves that the critics are only speculating. Christians are not, of course, speculating, they know!
The truth is that all history depends on evidence and has to be tested by the scientific method because we can never revisit a historical moment to decide for ourselves what really happened. Even the most graphic evidence needs to be considered with skepticism. A copy of a newspaper might be proof that Kennedy was assassinated, but nowadays spoof newspapers and even spoof film footages, like the Roswell alien autopsy footage, can look convincing. We need little convincing of the Kennedy assassination because there is masses of evidence that would have had to have all been forged for the assassination to have been untrue. Yet Christians believe from the evidence in four gospels, three of which are not independent anyway, that were written by those who had a vested interest in spreading the story.
Our Christian Auntie continues:
Second, you might point out that if he is right, IT DIDNT WORK VERY WELL! The Jews were never under control by the prophets—they killed every one of them! The prophets wrote the bible, not the controlling leadership! The leaders always killed the messengers of God—even Jesus referred to this (Mt 23.30;37). This is REAL historical data that proves him wrong.
This answer beggars belief, unless you are a Christian of course, when you will believe anything. The prophets are “REAL historical data?” Auntie assumes the bible is true, so the prophets must have been true. Sorry, Auntie, you are being dishonest again—effectively assuming the answer to the question.
The Jewish religion did not exist until the Persians sent some colonists to Judah in the fifth century. They were to control the people and invented the personality, if not the name, of the Jewish god to do it. The whole point about the Persian “returners” was that they presented books that depicted the people as sinners who had to repent or be destroyed by the vengeful god—implying the Persians as God’s agents in the world. That is how they were controlled, and the stories of them killing prophets was part of the tale, showing them to be ingrates. Doubtless, the people being subject to this yoke objected for some time, and did kill some of the colonists and officials. All grist to the mill. They were confirming what the recently written holy books said.
There is not one biblical scholar that will deny that the so-called “post-exilic” religion of the Israelites was different from the one they had in Assyrian times, prophets or no-prophets. The proof that the scheme succeeded is that, after about 100 years, the Jews believed the books imposed upon them by the Persians. The Jewish religion had been born!
Our naïve correspondent with Auntie says his atheistic heckler has claimed that the bible is a beautifully written piece of fiction. Auntie responds as usual telling him to ask for proof! This is a typical dishonest ploy they use all the time. They adopt tall stories that no sensible person could believe, then insist that the critic should proove them false. They have a buddy Jesus in their skulls and tell critics to prove it is not real. Auntie adds that nobody thought the bible was fiction for centuries in the past, presumably implying that it must therefore be true. People touched wood for good luck for centuries, so is that true too?
But now Auntie gets to the real blatant lies:
Every historical fact in it bears out in archeology… every detail looks like an eyewitness… the authors died as criminals for their belief that this was true… common people in the 1st century Palestine didn’t write fiction! (that was for the elite Greeks and Romans outside of Palestine).
Archaeology does almost the opposite, showing that whole swathes of the bible is fiction because there is not the least evidence or only highly controversial evidence in a few cases for such stories as Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Judges, David, Solomon, Esther and so on. If every detail looks like an eyewitness account, it only says something for Christian credulity. Opinion like this is subjective and useless as evidence.
Our Auntie has no idea at all how the authors of the biblical books died because he does not know who they were. By the same token, he would deduce that the Diaries of Adrian Mole were written by Adrian Mole.
Auntie tells his naïve charge that common people did not write fiction, apparently presuming to know that these books were written by “common people.” Common people did not write, full stop. These books were plainly not written by common people. The Old Testament books were written by Persian administrators, and the first century writers he refers to were literate Essenes or, even according to Christian tradition, were mainly educated people—a doctor, a tax collector, the son of a wealthy woman, a man educated in the best Jewish school there was. Common? And since when were the New Testament books written in Palestine? Most, if not all, were not.
Auntie and his types get away with this utter dishonesty because the average Christian punter, like his simple questioner, has no idea where to look for valid information, do not even read honest commentaries on their own bible, and have not the skill to unravel Christian polemical trickery. The safest advice to anyone puzzled about Christianity is:
Do not believe anything that a Christian says. They are incorrigible liars because they think it is acceptable to lie for God.
If God really created the world, he also created the concept of truth. Did he do it so that Christians could lie unrepentantly for 2000 years?
Propagated by Rogues
Our Christian agony Aunt, Ima Phibber, had to deal with a question from an innocent who suggested that, if Christianity in the first century was falsely being propagated by rogues for their own ends, then, when the people who knew it was false from their own direct experience had died, evidence that the religion was false would die with them.
Auntie tells us:
The ONLY way this could possibly occur, would be if the people who “knew better” (the “opposition") NEVER TOLD (convinced) another person about the “real truth."
And, Auntie says, there were lots of people who were opposing the Christians, such as Pharisees, rabbis and scribes in the first century who were organized vocal, motivated by power, had many followers of their own, were successful in propagating their own message and succeeded in preserving disagreements with Christians in their own writings so “we could be rather confident that the Christians did not win because of the silence (and eventual death) of the ruling Jewish hegemony!"
Auntie, therefore seems to be saying yes the people who knew about the Christians rogues and knew Christianity was false did die out but they told lots of people first, explaining the consistent opposition to Christianity by first century Jews.
So, at least in Jerusalem, until its destruction (after the NT had already basically been written and circulating), there were strong and vocal anti-Christian movements that would (and did) proclaim disagreement with the early Jewish-Christian leadership (as described often in Acts).
However, in the wider empire, early Christian missionaries like Paul were at work spreading the phony message about the crucified god among Hellenized Jews and the first gentile converts. More pious traditional Jews often were outraged as Acts suggests, but Hellenized Jews were not—they were used to Pagan religions in which rising gods were common—and the leadership of the Jerusalem Church had to send messengers to counteract Paul’s mischief. But Hellenized Jews were much more happy to accept a less rigorous regime that suited life among the gentiles better. And gentile godfearers were delighted. In short, they were not listening to the objections of the hasids because they preferred the looser religion.
When Was the New Testament Written?
Auntie makes the assertion that the New Testament was written and circulating before the destruction of Jerusalem, a statement that is at best dubious, and most Christian would deny—so it is a lie. Some of Paul’s letters purport to have been written, but had not been published and probably were not for decades yet. The gospels were not written until after the war—an early draft of Mark, possibly during it.
What then of after the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews. Even more Jews came west and many knew what happened to Jesus personally or at little remove. They began telling the true story of the Christian god—he was a Jewish rebel.
The embryonic church had no option but to counter these travellers tales that were making the missionaries and their converts into a laughing stock. So, they wrote the first gospel about 70 AD to counter the stories being put about. They could not deny all the stories outright because that would undermine the base of reality they had. These Jews were arriving with true stories about Jesus. They were confirming that Jesus had lived.
What the bishops did not like was that the stories were stories about an Essene rebel, not about a god. The Essene leader had rebelled against the Romans and even captured Jerusalem. Plainly that could not have been admitted, so the story of it was converted into the exorcism of the Gadarene swine.
Nevertheless, people knew that Jerusalem had been captured in an insurrection, so the bishops had to concede that it had, but by a bandit called Barabbas. Barabbas was, of course, Jesus, but the bishops pretended he was someone else, and used him to blacken Jewish character by writing that the Jews had preferred the criminal to Jesus, when his many supporters had actually been calling for Jesus himself. So they wheedled their way round the truth sufficiently to convince their flocks, no less gullible then than they are now.
Auntie tells her own flock that the founders of Christianity…
…had the greatest ability to investigate matters, the best access to literature, information, and travel, AND the most skeptical of dispositions!
So, Auntie says the original gentile Christians would have uncovered any fraud, when these were the very people who were instigating it! Auntie cannot resist quoting to us the evidence that the Christians were honest—the Christian New Testament writings that were published at just this time. He frequently quotes from Acts, a work that shows Paul and his fellow travellers as being extremely unpopular among many Jewish communities. And the verdict of history is that the people closest to the whole affair, the Jews, consistently rejected Christian claims, and mostly still do!
Auntie says to our innocent enquirer:
It should give you some idea of how easy it would have been for an individual or group to vividly and widely contest Christian claims about Jesus.
The early history of Church, as described in all the sources we have, is indeed characterized by this vigorous debate, confrontation, accusation, harassment, etc. It is quite safe to say that Christianity did NOT “win” because the opposition remained “quiet until they died"!!
Typically, here at the end we find that Auntie is answering a question that was not asked. The innocent wondered whether the people who knew Christianity was false would die off leaving the confidence tricksters to maintain the fraud. The answer has to be, Yes! Jews never ceased to assert that Christianity was a fraud, and Christians hardly ever ceased in their attempt to harass the Jews to extinction, but the people who knew the truth died and cannot be called as witnesses, not least because had they written anything to prove their position, the Christians would have burnt it. In Christian Europe, they killed and burnt the bibles of many Jews, as no honest Christian can deny and no historian would.
Chicken or Egg
How did the concept of gods arise? Either humanity invented the idea of gods or, as religious believers would have it, the gods invented humanity. Ima Phibber asks how anyone could come to the conclusion that mankind invented God?—not gods! The apologist as usual begins with his belief.
Then he moves on to the impossible proofs ploy, asking what historical or archaeological data supported the idea of gods being invented.
There is no evidence of development at all in the earliest written records of humanity. Religion already was present in earliest recorded history of civilization, completely full-blown and developed. So, I cannot imagine how you could identify a point in time in which this “invention” occurred?
This apologist leads his unwary victim into thinking what is not recorded did not happen. History means events that are written down, so when something happened before people knew how to write, it is prehistoric—but it still happened! There is no written record of anyone inventing the stone axe, but it obviously happened. It is true that there is no written record of when the first idea of a god arose, but it obviously happened. The point is that there were no stone axes until someone made the first one. Similarly there were no gods until the first human being conceived of them. Being the first to conceive of the idea of something abstract is inventing it.
Our apologist does not want to think of this so he blurts:
Not only can we not identify in historical sources a point of “invention” of the concept of god, we cannot even trace a line of development!
He is adding nothing to his previous faulty argument. He is still pretending that what is not recorded could not have happened. If the idea were invented before recording began, how can we trace a line of development. Credulous Christians seem to accept all this guff as if they had no tongues to ask questions or no minds to think of them. Our apologist now tells us:
The earliest religious practices on record are from ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. And these ancient religions have very well-developed theologies, rituals, ethical systems, and even institutions. Even the universality of the flood traditions in all ancient cultures (in which a god or gods judged the world with a flood) represents an essentially “modern” religious outlook.
Phibber is telling us what happened 4000 years ago is modern enough for us today. The things he speaks of were designed to influence the lives of the ancients by promoting the fertility of crops animals and themselves, and to keep people in order by suggesting that gods were likely to be angered by certain types of behaviour. Is this Christian apologist suggesting that we should follow these practices now? Or is he suggesting that his God was fooling everyone at that early stage of history? He will want to do neither, but does not expect his readers to ask such questions. He wants to give the impression that Christianity was inherent in people even so long ago because they were religious and religion today for Americans is Christianity.
Our apologist betrays this when he refers to the legend of the Flood, but fails to see that the belief in an ancient myth like the Flood is plainly not what he says it is—a modern religious outlook! It is a very ancient religious outlook, and anyone who still believes such things has a primitive outlook themselves. It is hardly surprising that the world is in a mess when there are so many people influential in the most powerful country ever known still believing the ideas of men dead for 3000 years.
We do not however, need to have the history of the evolution of gods to be able to deduce it from what history we have, and from anthropology and psychology. We can see the psychology of it even today in the many people who are convinced that aliens with supernatural powers are interfering with them every night. That is a belief of sophisticated people in a sophisticated world. Primitive people had far more reason to invent such beings—there were many things they did not understand, both harmful and beneficial, that they attributed to intelligent causes. Unsophisticated people believe in spirits suited to the world they inhabit and to their world outlook. Before 500 BC Xenophanes of Colophon wrote:
If oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with them, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen. Each kind would make their bodies in their own form. The Ethiopians say their gods are black and snub-nosed. The Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Modern Christians have advanced no further. Indeed they find it necessary to say that their conception of a god “created us with a pre-built notion of a disembodied consciousness with virtually unlimited abilities,” so that we would come up with an idea of god to allow the god to communicate with us. It is one of those Christian theories that can be used for anything, but for which they have no proof at all—and these are the people who demand proof! It is just the same argument as those who said god invented fossils to fool us into thinking that evolution had occurred rather than a creation—to test our faith.
Furthermore, he tells us “God as an abstract idea is on the same level many other absractions that ‘exist’”—consciousness, mind, justice, love, truth. Well, plainly it is not, because no abstract noun can act of its own volition, whereas these people insist that their own abstraction can create a whole world! They are thoroughly dishonest. Do not be beguiled by them.
