06/06/2021
Today I spoke with author Jonathan M.S. Pearce about his new book "The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHKs5vbu4Kg
As we dove into the book, we touched on many aspects of the story of the resurrection of Jesus, including:
• The elitist side of Christian apologetics, where apologists say that only if you study hard enough can you find the truth of how the atonement truly works.
• The competing theories of atonement, including penal substitution.
• Blood magic, Yom Kippur, and the Pascal lamb.
• The moral culpability of the god character, who supposedly created the world with divine foreknowledge, yet his creation is a big mess theologically.
• How god is burning most humans just to go to hell (or be annihilated).
• The dynamic that stunningly extraordinary and exceptional claims require stunningly extraordinary and exceptional evidence.
• The special pleading and begging that Christians do regarding the claims of the Gospels regarding the Resurrection, especially in light of prior probability, such as the way that Christians reject the claims of other similar Greco-Roman mystery cults while still claiming Christian claims are legitimate.
• How the Gospels are written in unknown places, at unknown times, by unknown authors--none of whom were eyewitnesses--with ex-post-facto agendas, making claims to people who, at the time, did not verify the claims, and had no way of verifying them.
• How the "historical methods" used by the Gospels is exceptionally poor.
• The fact that the NT writers had an agenda.
• Realizing that Christians cannot imagine that the Resurrection might be simply "made up," even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way.
• Terror management: how Christians cannot rationally debate or analyze the claims and details of the NT, because they cannot handle the implications, which threaten their hope of an afterlife and their overall worldview.
• Why we need to accept explanations that are most probable versus those that make claims which have no evidence and fall apart logically.
• How childhood indoctrination sets us up to analyze the world based on what we're taught, versus what is probable, and how we can do it with other religions, but not our own.
• How we are programmed to believe our elders.
• The dangers of taking ideas "on faith," which amounts to belief without evidence.
• How Christians claim that their evidence is much better than it really is.
• How every single Gospel claim is problematic and easily challenged.
• Realizing that while we were stuck in Christianity we were blind to its bizarreness, such as the doctrine of transubstantiation, where we "eat the flesh and drink the blood" of our demigod.
• How our dread of death and fears of mortality drive us to "need" the story of the resurrection to be true.
• How the Bible's god character creates a façade of being a stabilizing and protective psychological function that "fills the void."
• The reality that absence of evidence for extraordinary claims DOES mean evidence of absence, if evidence never appears.
• The fact that Paul provides almost no details about the resurrection, and that the Gospels introduce later embellishments to the early versions of the Resurrection story.
• How the dynamics of apocalypticism and messianism could have mixed with the disappointment, grief, anger, and guilt of early Christians in order for them to come up with the Resurrection mythology.
• How the Resurrection is "theology with an agenda," but not history.
• The fact that we believe because of indoctrination and societal pressure, not because we've truly studied the evidence.
• Rebuilding our identities and worldview, and learning to celebrate life, after we realize that the resurrection stories are mythological.
• And much more!
Thanks to Jonathan for his amazing insights and for helping us to see that the stories of Christianity are not history.
