Truth
Jesus or Christians, Who is Right? 4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 04, 1999
Monday, 12 September 2005
The Scientific Errors of God’s Son
If Jesus were really the Son of God, it would be reasonable to expect him to behave with unusual knowledge of nature. Yet he shows no unusual knowledge of how things actually are and repeatedly shows himself to be as ignorant as the average person of the time. Indeed he was more ignorant by far than many of the Hellenistic people that he despised. They had considerable knowledge already about the nature of the world and the Romans were superb soldiers and engineers.
Jesus never uses the word “philosophy” or mentions the word “science”. Everything was produced and controlled by the arbitrary power of an angry vengeful God. He evidently had no idea of a ruling principle in Nature or of the existence of natural law as controlling anything. Many doctrines attributed to Jesus are contradicted by modern science.
- Diseases are not produced by demons, devils, or wicked spirits. Does any Christian today believe they are? It is a Persian myth.
- His rebuking a fever (Lk 4:39) is in the same unscientific and superstitious category of false understanding.
- His belief in a literal hell of fire and brimstone (Mt 18:8) is a Persian superstition, science knows nothing about.
- His belief in a personal devil (Mt 17:18) is another unscientific Persian folk tale.
He saw no limits to the possible. God moved things and for God anything was possible. God was a supernatural being, who possessed unlimited power and who ruled and controlled everything by his arbitrary will, without any law or any limitation to its exercises. He firmly believed that God was about to fulfil His part of the covenant He had entered into with His Chosen People by uniting heaven and earth into a kingdom of God which would make the world free of sin and corruption. Hence he told his disciples they would have anything they prayed for and that, by faith alone, they could roll mountains into the sea, or bring to a halt the rage of a furious storm at sea.
He never taught that the practice of virtue contains its own reward, because for him the reward came from God. He never taught people to measure the right and wrong of their actions by their effect upon people, society or the world in general. And he omitted to teach the most important lesson that we can learn—to accept responsibility for our actions and not blame them on others, whether other people or supernatural demons. Nor did he teach that no one can attain happiness without exercising as many of their mental and physical faculties as they are able. Indeed his principle follower, Paul, advocated ignorance, to the detriment of the world for a thousand years at least. If he had taught any of these lessons and his followers had followed them rather than ignoring his teachings as they always have, he would have done more to advance the happiness of the human race than all the sermons of the apostles and priests from then until now.
Jesus declared he came to call sinners to repentance (Mt 9:13)—a mental process, which consists of arousing guilty feelings to force people back to the pre-rational innocence of childhood, offered as a god-like state of being. Consequently repentant sinners often condemn the good as well as the bad in their lifetime behaviour. If Jesus forgave sins, as he is believed to have done, the grounds can be equally dubious. Forgiveness of sins does nothing about the sinful act already committed, or about cancelling its effects upon people, society and nature. Genuinely wicked acts should surely never be forgiven, if criminals and tyrants are to learn to expect justice. Forgiveness is only justified when people are overwhelmed by guilt over something which they could not avoid or for which they were not responsible.
Christian belief is the antithesis of science, which is why bishops and preachers decried, and still decry, science. Science demands evidence. Belief demands only the mediation of some self-appointed expert in God. Rationally, without evidence, no one should believe. With it, no one should rationally disbelieve. Christians pretend to offer evidence but it is a sham. Refute their evidence and they still believe.
Nothing could more completely demonstrate a total ignorance of astronomy than Jesus saying the stars would fall to earth (Mk 13:25). Stars which are much larger than the earth itself could not fall to earth. Perhaps in this context the expression can be forgiven since Jesus is speaking of the end of the world as we know it and what better image could generate the thought than the falling of stars, but it proves that the words of the New Testament should not be taken literally.
The conflagration of the world, the gathering of the elect, and the commencement of God’s heavenly kingdom, which he several times predicted would take place before his generation passed away (Mt 24:34), proves a belief in old myths rather than the modern truths of astronomy and science, as well as an inability to prophesy—a curious failing in a Son of God.
He believed similar things had happened before. He accepts the truth of the myth of the flood (Lk 17:27) in which only Noah and his ark were saved. Today we are amazed at the widespread belief in flood myths, but there is no evidence of any universal flood in the time of men upon the earth, and any flood able to put a large vessel on the top of a high mountain must have left signs of itself. The fact is that few people do not experience floods. Most people live in lowland areas because they are best for farming and even those who live in highlands are subject to flash floods which can be even more instantaneously devastating. There is a firm basis in the whole of humanity for horror stories of floods to be retold. The biblical flood is identical in all key respects with earlier stories found on cuneiform tablets in Babylonia. Where did the priests come from who re-wrote the Jewish scriptures under the guidance of Ezra’s school? Babylon!
Jesus seems foolish, unscientific, bad-tempered and arrogant when he cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season (Mk 11:13). Of all the passages in the gospels that are difficult for Christians, this is the worst. Jesus is out of his Christian character. When seen historically not religiously, it is quite different. The fig tree was a symbol of Rome!
Divine Teachings?
Christians admire the beauty and charm of Jesus’s teachings, as self-evidently divine, but his central doctrines were not original, and were often neither beautiful nor charming. He upholds the innumerable atrocities of the Old, and adds worse terrors and atrocities of its own in the shape of eternal torture. Nor did he so far value his own teachings as to put them consistently into practice.
When the lawyer came to ask Jesus, before a large crowd, what he should do to inherit eternal life, he had a wonderful opportunity to enunciate new and revealing precepts of wisdom and morality. Yet what happened? He merely repeated maxims well known from the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Some of his wise sayings were uttered long before by sages like Confucius who anticipated Jesus by some 550 years when he offered his version of the Golden Rule, and said of it:
Thou hast need of this law alone; it is the foundation of all the rest.He clarified what he meant by adding:
Acknowledge thy benefits by return of other benefits, but never avenge injuries.
The cursing of the barren fig-tree seems a display of folly and childish petulance, and what could be more unjust than Jesus’s maxim:
Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath?Mt 13:12
Can anyone seriously believe that the revelation which Christian priests offer is of divine origin, when Jesus says:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, but a sword,Mt 10:34
and is anyone honestly surprised when in the twentieth century alone a hundred million people are killed by Christians? Jesus’s prophecy has been fulfilled literally. The Christian revelation is so barbarous that no one could be surprised that bloodshed should prepare its way.
Christ as a Man, and Christ as a Sectarian
To any observant and unbiased mind a strange contrast is visible in the practical life of the Christian Jesus. He had a deep sympathy for poor, unfortunate and downtrodden people and he seemed to want to ease their sufferings. But as a religious leader, he seemed to demand obedience and if anyone dissented his whole nature seemingly changed. It was no longer, “Blessed are ye”, but “Cursed are ye”, or “Woe unto you”. Especially in John, he seemed to teach that the world was to be saved through faith specifically in him and his way. All who did not honour him were to be dishonoured by the Father and without faith in him, it is impossible to please God.
He was ardent toward friends and bitter toward enemies, and extolled his own religious ideals while denouncing all others. His way was the only way. All who did not walk therein, or conform thereto, were loaded with curses and imprecations. All who could not accomplish the impossible mental achievement of believing everything he set forth or urged upon their credence, and that, too, without evidence, were to be eternally damned.
He declared that all who were not for him were against him, and all who were not on the same road were heathens and publicans. His disciples were enjoined to shake off the dust from their feet as a manifestation of displeasure toward those who could not conscientiously subscribe to their creeds and dogmas. He then could tolerate no such thing as liberty of conscience, or freedom of thought, or the right to differ with him in religious belief. We discover a vein of intolerance and sectarianism in the apparently otherwise kind and loving Jesus.
None of this can be properly explained in terms of the divine son of God. Only by appreciating that the historical Jesus and the sect to which he belonged had double standards can these puzzles be explained. Jesus was kind and sympathetic towards his countrymen and co-religionists, the Jews, who were mainly impoverished and oppressed by the foreign tyrants, the Romans. The poor, oppressed Jews he loved and wanted to free from their oppression. The foreigners who were exploiting the Jews and the Jews who collaborated with the foreigners to keep wealthy, those he called publicans in the Bible, he hated. He was eventually hung as a rebel against the occupying power—Christians say unjustly. His fate was the fate of a rebel because he was a rebel. Examined as history all the evidence points to that conclusion.
Jesus, thinking that the end of the world was nigh, had no ideas about rules and diktats to control future people’s lives. His teachings can only be taken as applying to his own time.
Christians frequently write on the internet that Jesus would be coming soon. It is hard indeed for merely rational people to understand whether Christians know the meaning of most of the words they read or use. Jesus said the kingdom would come within a generation of his life. He meant within 40 years of when he lived in the first century. It is now 2000 years later and a Christian is indignant that someone else cannot accept that Jesus will come soon. There can be no hope at all that anyone like that will ever be reasonable. It is difficult not to believe that someone who cannot read English in their own bible is sane, let alone intelligent or rational.
Nevertheless there must be far more Christians able to read and understand, like the rest of us, who must be disturbed that God or the Holy Ghost can be so contradictory and perverse. Even that thought is such a challenge to their faith that they will immediately try to shrug off, leaving the perpetual puzzle that Christianity creates of why God gives us brains to allow us to reason then tells us not to use them. No sane person could accept that such a god is sane.
It is more sensible to accept that unscrupulous exploiters, not God, have tried to stop people from using their wits. When Christians realize that the book they think was written by God was written by evangelists and priests who wanted to control people and make them do as they wanted, then they will have taken a great step to freedom. Fresh ideas, as they arose, have had to be forced on to the church—the evangelists and priests of each age. Each age sees a miracle—the unchanging God reluctantly accepts a change and the Holy Books get another step out of date. But Christians either do not notice or do not care! Yet the God of the bible is now so out of synchonization with the world that He must soon be discarded or the world will be.
If Jesus really had power to condemn unbelievers to eternal damnation, all people should obey his every word. If Jesus was impeccable in his advice and his teachings, he should be followed literally. No matter which of these two options the Christians choose, they should sell all their possessions, trust in the heavenly Father and take no thought for the morrow—that is Jesus’s way to salvation. If Jesus was neither a God nor an infallible man, he was simply a man. To worship him as a God or as a perfect being is perverse.
Jesus can be regarded as God, man or myth, but to be significant he must be judged by his works, as he himself affirmed. If he is to be offered as a perfect icon, a role model or a god to be revered, then, no matter whether he lived or not, he must be found to be essentially flawless in word and deed. By the gospel evidence alone, Jesus was seriously flawed. If it be argued that the flaws have been introduced, then the bible has no authority and the whole picture is unbelievable.
Jesus is not an acceptable role model. His sayings are often obscure and interpreted in different ways. He gave us many rules to live by but they were not practical rules and mainly they have been abandoned. He failed to consider the needs of the future. Jesus offered but did not deliver the knowledge so much needed by people to enable them to shape their course through life. People are still confused about how to live correctly, how best to meet each situation, what action is suited to the occasion.
If Jesus came to save the world two thousand years ago, why is it still in a mess? Christians can hardly say that the world is better than it was because of Christianity. Whenever Christianity has been at its strongest, the world has been a terrifying and horrific place to be in. Why?—because of the Christians! As we have noted above, few of the tenets of Jesus are applied in the modern world, yet the world is better than it has been whenever priests have been dominant.
Christians are beguiled with the idea of a completed revelation. It is simpler to know precisely what to do in life and be gratified that you are doing right. The trouble is that they are not doing right. And the strength of their belief makes them resist change so that they are implacably conservative. That is what the church wants.
The Christian Jesus is a myth. The myth has surely been built around a person in history but, like Faustus, Robin Hood and William Tell his exploits have grown to smother the man. Their lives are more fanciful than real. If you eliminate from the life of Jesus as unhistorical his birth, his miracles, his ideas about God, his resurrection, ascension and messianic mission, Christ disappears as well. This, though, is a harsh way to treat him. The truth is that miracles, his ideas about God and his messianic mission were an important part of the historic Jesus. It is simply that they were not what Christians have always taken them to be. Jesus was an entirely Jewish phenomenon, a phenomenon of his times, explicable in that milieu and, indeed, similar to several other even more shadowy figures.
The gospels show themselves to be compilations of wise sayings and proverbs attracted around a stylised image of a man thought to have been a god. If the god is rejected, the wisdom of the sayings and proverbs does not necessarily all go too. As a compilation, they do not pretend to be an ethical system. They can be contradictory because too many cooks spoil the broth but nonetheless many hands make light work. If a complete ethical system is needed it must be sought elsewhere but if the compilation be accepted for application according to the circumstances, as appropriately defined by the historical situation, then hardly any saying need go.
Knowledge is cumulative. The teachings of Jesus, once considered perfection, have been changed in practice if not in theology. Many of the precepts of Jesus are simply no longer followed even by devout Christians. In their place are principles which are practised by these Christians daily. Logically they should recognize this and adopt a moral system which allows for change. The system which embodies change is the natural system where nothing is constant.
Critics of Jesus or Christianity are accused of being destructive—faith should not be destroyed unless there is something to replace it. Not here! Put in its place the superior concept of Nature which, unlike the invisible, intractable, ineffable God, is seen, felt and spoken about daily.
Stories are not true, even stories about God. The truth is what we see in nature or what we can deduce to explain what we see. Thus even truth is subject to change but, if we are honest, we can have a truth which is up to date, a truth based on the best information available. If that is combined with intuitive caution we have the best principles of continuity and change simultaneously at our disposal.
Every pleasure is not a sin, but rejection of theology does not imply indifference to evil. Nature warns against excess more strongly than any ancient command. The fear of natural or man-decreed punishment in this world should be as potent as the dread of eternal torment threatened by Jesus. Instead of depending upon Jesus because we are scared, we must seek the Truth. This requires more practical courage than professing Jesus, whose teachings can be construed to mean whatever the reader desires.
Jesus made mistakes. Every instance cited may not appeal to all readers as worthy of criticism, but there can be no doubt in the mind of any honest thinker that many of Jesus’s ideas were erroneous or unsuitable as universal maxims. His theology was filled with superstitions, his cosmology was that of the pre-scientific era, he expected the end of the world within a generation, his conception of sin was theological rather than ethical, he failed to convince his hearers by his oratory, he exaggerated the results possible from prayer and he related parables that gave a false sense of values.
Christian parents hold up Jesus to their children as an ideal person, but Jesus denied this perfection:
Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.Mt 19:17
Jesus thought God was perfect. To anyone reading the Jewish scriptures he was anything but, but Jesus said he was less perfect than God. Why then do Christians deny what Jesus said himself about himself? Easy, isn’t it! It is because they positively ignore almost everything that the gospel Jesus said in favour of their own idiosyncratic construct of him.
They have a purely emotional picture of Jesus quite unrelated to anything the gospels say about him. The truth can only be that Christians do not read the gospels or the scriptures. Otherwise they would know that they were talking nonsense in almost everything they hold concerning Jesus and God. People are brought up as Christians and taught kiddy stories about Jesus at school and Sunday school. They never turn to the bible as adults, probably because they have better things to do and read, but that leaves them with the kiddy image they were first given.
Christians should grow up.
Conclusion
Christians claim that Jesus’s teaching and moral system are too faultless to challenge, and too perfect to improve. This is witless nonsense. Most of the precepts taken by his followers for 2000 years to be timeless and universal were nothing of the kind. Significantly, today Christians habitually ignore most of Jesus’s universal injunctions with no thought of hell fire. They see no contradiction in claiming to embrace Christianity though they do not live it out, or even attempt to do so! They impose upon the world a system of morality intended for a particular time and place but pushed to such extremes that its own professed admirers are obliged to ignore it in their daily rounds. They long ago abandoned it as an impracticable duty. Its requisitions are daily violated and trampled under foot by all Christians.
Where is the professed Christian who:
- takes no thought for the morrow;
- lays not up treasure on earth;
- gives their wealth to the poor;
- gives up their coat also, when their cloak is wrested from them by a robber;
- calls no man mister;
- calls no man father, unless they are orphaned or abandoned,
- calls no man a fool truthfully or not;
- turns the other cheek to be battered when some lout smacks them in the face;
- prays without ceasing;
- rejoices when persecuted;
- forgives offences four hundred and ninety times;
- loves their enemies in practical ways rather than calling the police or suing them in the civil courts;
- forsakes houses and land, and everything, for the kingdom of heaven’s sake; etc, etc?
No Christian lives up to these precepts or tries to do so. A species is characterised by certain fixed features. A Christian is supposedly characterised by following the precepts cited by the evangelists of Christ in the gospels. In taxonomy, one might allow that a feature might have been lost for some good reason or another in a species, yet the remaining features are sufficient still to identify the creature to which it belongs. Practically the only feature Christians have retained is the name Christian, and that was not given to them by Jesus! If someone can be a Christian while openly and habitually violating the precepts of Christ, then the word has no meaning.
These precepts belonged to an apocalyptic sect of Judaism which died out as Christianity formed. They were hard enough to follow then, but later became impossible to follow, so Christian bishops simply said, “Forget it”! The practical precepts of Christianity have now been so diluted that all that remains is a self satisfied set of back-patters feeling comfortable in their ignorance by the praise of their equally smug friends.
