'The Case for Christ' and a stubbornly historical religion

[Humanist_Activist]

80. Apologetics generally bore me but this shallow intellectualism is amusing....

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]So what were his inquiries? First, he wondered whether the resurrection stories were just fairy tales, pious inventions meant to take away our fear of death. But he learned that, in point of fact, many people claimed to have seen Jesus after his crucifixion, including five hundred at once. Moreover, most of the leaders of the early Church went to their deaths defending the legitimacy of what they taught. Would anyone do that for a myth or a legend of his own invention?

OK, let's unpack this one. First, the strawman, I don't know anyone who argues that the resurrection story is supposed to alleviate fear of death for everyone. It's the fact that Jesus saves you and you get to be resurrected later in paradise that is the selling point. But that's neither here nor there, the issue is this, out of the 4 canonical gospels, the earliest was possibly written as early as 30-40 years after Jesus died, with the others being written about 50-80 years later. These are lifetimes of differences we are talking about, and it shouldn't be no surprise that the shortest gospel, and the one with the least amount of elaboration, is also the one scholars think was written earlier.

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]But another question came to his mind: might they all have been victims of a mass hallucination? A psychologist patiently explained that waking dreams are not shared by hundreds of people at different times and different places. “If hundreds of individuals had the same hallucination, that would be a greater miracle than the resurrection,” she informed him with a smile.

This is a classic case of the Mandela effect combined with confirmation bias. You don't need to "make it up" consciously, but rather your brain just has to fool you into believing in it. It doesn't even have to take lifetimes for this to be achieved. Eyewitness testimony from last week is notoriously unreliable, much less from decades ago. People also have the gift of believing what they want to believe, to the level that even in the face of contrary evidence, they believe it regardless. Examples include the people who believe that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, people who have seen Elvis after he died, all sorts of witnesses to numerous paranormal, spiritualist and psuedo-scientific phenomenon. Were the witnesses who recited or were the sources for the canonical gospels any different from modern people?

The thing to keep in mind is that neither the people who had first or second hand accounts of Jesus resurrection, nor those who believed Nelson Mandela died were crazy or liars. They believed what they believed, and there was nothing wrong with them mentally. They could have been or were mistaken in their own memories, and that's normal. Happens to all of us, and accounts for things such as false memories and all sorts of incongruities with our memory are generally ignored because our brain tries to organize itself in a way so we don't go insane with contradictory and inaccurate memory, hence the ability to have cognitive dissonance. Every had an argument with a parent about what type of cake you had on your 10th birthday? It's kinda like that.

But of course, Strobel and Barron aren't psychologists or psychiatrists, and probably didn't consult with either to assist in answering the questions they had above. Combine this with mass psychology, for example, in-group think and in-group memory, and you can explain mass hallucinations quite easily. In fact, the Resurrection story isn't even unique here, there have been stories of apparitions of Jesus and/or Mary appearing in front of crowds for centuries. Same with UFOs and other phenomenon. Some of these the Catholic Church itself discounts as mass hysteria/hallucination.

This also explains why many people were and are willing to die for things that, in some cases, they themselves made up. Usually this occurs in the group setting, peer pressure is a powerful thing and can exaggerate such beliefs. Look at what happened with the Heaven's Gate cult? All that's required is that they sincerely had to believe it was true and that they were going to be "saved" from death somehow, and they happily died for that belief. These people weren't mentally unstable, they simply had a self destructive belief that they carried. There are numerous other examples throughout history, touching on every religious and nonreligious belief people have. Are all these beliefs true, or even worth dying for? Actually, are any beliefs worth dying for? Now that's a question for the ages.

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left:1em; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius:0.4615em; box-shadow:-1px -1px 3px #999999 inset;"]But what about the reliability of the Christian texts themselves? Weren’t they written long after the events described? A Catholic priest, who is also an archeologist and specialist in ancient manuscripts, told him that the number of early copies of the Christian Gospels far surpasses that of any other ancient text, including the Iliad of Homer and the Dialogues of Plato.

I don't understand this argument at all, having read the Gospels myself, they seem to mostly written in a narrative style fitting epic or mythic storytelling, not much different from Iliad, quite a bit different from most of the Dialogues. Who is this priest he's referencing, and what evidence does this priest present that makes the Gospels extraordinary?

I actually read "The Case for Christ" quite a few years ago, and it was and is typical apologetics wrapped in pseudo-intellectual scholarism and philosophizing. Hence the reason why I said apologetics, and also theology, bore me. There's nothing to pursue here, there's no room for growth, there are a lot of hypotheticals, a lot of speculation, a lot of questions, and no means of getting the answers. In most cases, the questions themselves are nonsensical. Neither subject advances humanity one iota, not ethically, not intellectually. Fields of study for nothing.