The Questioning Christian

"Why Are These People So Compulsively Overheated?"

My favorite political columnist, David Brooks of the NY Times, offers some observations ($) about Washington politics that strike me as equally applicable to some of our traditionalist brethren in the Episcopal Church (extra paragraphing added):

The question is, why are these [Democrats] so compulsively overheated?  One of the president's top advisers is indicted on serious charges. Why are they incapable of leaving it at that?  Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged?

The answer is found in an essay written about 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

Hofstadter argues that sometimes people who are dispossessed, who feel their country has been taken away from them and their kind, develop an angry, suspicious and conspiratorial frame of mind.

It is never enough to believe their opponents have committed honest mistakes or have legitimate purposes; they insist on believing in malicious conspiracies.

"The paranoid spokesman," Hofstadter writes, "sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization."

Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction. Failure to achieve this unattainable goal "constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration."

Thus, "even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes."

The Empty Tomb: Another Possibility

(This posting is part of a book in progress, tentatively titled What Really Happened to Jesus?  A Lawyer Reexamines the Evidence, and What It Means for Christians and Christianity.)

Why was Jesus’s tomb empty? 

• The classic Christian account is that Jesus was raised from the dead.  But that explanation is problematic in view of the evidence, as discussed in Chapter(s) __ [in progress — ed.]. 
• At the time, some claimed that Jesus’s disciples had simply moved the body, and that he was as dead as ever.  But if that were true, it’d be difficult to explain why so many of the disciples later died willingly for their belief that in fact Jesus returned to the living.

On close examination, the evidence suggests still another possibility:  After the Sabbath, someone other than the disciples secretly moved Jesus’s body to an undisclosed location, without deigning to inform the disciples or anyone else. 

An obvious suspect is Joseph of Arimathea.  He had motive.  He had opportunity.  And he had already demonstrated the self-confidence to boldly take action he deemed necessary, without consulting the Eleven or even Jesus’s family.

Is Religion Good For You? An Economist Tries to Answer

In a recent paper abstracted here, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber suggests:

that religious attendance increases the number of social interactions in a way peculiar to religious settings;

that religious institutions provide financial and emotional "insurance" that help people mitigate their losses when setbacks occur;

that attendance at religious schools may be an advantage; and, finally,

that religious faith may simply improve well-being directly by enabling the faithful to be "less stressed out" by the problems of every day life.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

Hat tip: TaxProfBlog via TitusOneNine.

The Mind Can Play Tricks

The Wall Street Journal’s science writer, Sharon Begley, reviews ($) the new book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, previously noted in this posting of last week.  Excerpt from the Begley piece (emphasis and extra paragraphing added):

Numerous studies have found that abductees are not suffering from mental illness.   They are unusually prone to false memories, she and colleagues found in a 2002 study, and tend to be unusually creative, fantasy-prone and imaginative, but so are lots of people who have never met a little green man.  *  *  *

Do they understand that sleep paralysis, in which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you remain unable to move, can mimic the weird visions and helplessness that abductees describe?  Of course, they say, but that doesn't apply to them. As one abductee explained, she was taken not while she slept but when she was on the couch watching Letterman.  *  *  *

The principle of parsimony that underpins all of science -- the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be right -- is, well, alien to abductees. So is the notion that "it feels right" doesn't make it so, and that exceptions to rules are, indeed, exceptions.

 

What Really Happened to Jesus?

(Draft of an introduction to a book in progress)

What really happened to Jesus?  In this book, we will try to take a fresh look at the evidence, using analytical tools borrowed from two great truth-seeking enterprises:  The law, and to a lesser extent, the sciences.

We won’t waste time considering whether the resurrection stories might be complete fabrications.   It seems reasonably well-established that (i) in the days following Jesus’s execution, at least some of his followers believed they had seen him alive, and (ii) their belief led to the unexpected rise of the church in first-century Mediterranean society.

But the central claim of Christianity goes quite a bit farther than that.  The church has always maintained that there was a specific reason the disciples believed they had seen Jesus:  God, the church claims, raised Jesus from the dead.  Most Christian doctrine rests on this claim.

This resurrection claim is an audacious one.  It’s long been understood that the claim goes against all human experience.  Historically, much of humanity has rejected the claim, or has been at best indifferent to it. 

There's comparatively little evidence to support the claim; even that evidence is open to attack on grounds of unreliability  — grounds that will be familiar to every lawyer.  We will review some of these grounds in the opening chapters.  Moreover, the Gospel stories, coupled with extra-scriptural information, provide us with hints that the real story might have been something else entirely (and I don’t mean the so-called swoon theory).   We will examine these hints later on.

Finally, we will ask a follow-up question:  After considering the evidence, suppose we were to conclude that we must reserve judgment about the resurrection, or even that we should tentatively rule it out.  Could we still consider ourselves to be “Christians”? 

I will argue that the answer is yes:  Even if there were no evidence to support the resurrection claim, there would still be persuasive, intellectually-disciplined reasons for us to worship the One God; to consider that God likely was at work in Jesus's life and its aftermath (even if we haven't yet figured out exactly how he did that work); and to try to live our lives as followers of the Galilean rabbi ("teacher").  Those things, I will argue, are what it really means to be a Christian.

Please Help Me Write a Book

I’m starting to write a book, with the working title What Really Happened to Jesus?  A Lawyer Reexamines the Evidence, and What It Means for Christianity and Christians.  I’d like my readers to help by providing critiques and comments.

The book arises from my identification with what we might call doubting seekers.  By that I mean people who sort of wish they could be Christians, but who are uncomfortable with “Christianity.”  These folks often spend their Sunday mornings worshipping at the Little Church of St. Starbucks, with the Sunday paper as their prayer book.  I used to be one of them.

I mourn what these people are missing in their lives.  I know firsthand what a difference it makes to trust in God.

Is Jesus Coming Again? The Predictors' Track Record Doesn't Inspire Confidence

There are plenty of persuasive reasons to follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth.  Absent from the list is the reason most often cited in the New Testament. 

Throughout the various books of the New Testament, a central theme — perhaps the central theme — was that very soon the risen Christ would be coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.  It didn’t happen, of course.  [UPDATE:  Further down in this posting, I've catalogued some of the NT passages in question.  I've also revised some of the arguments here in response to some good points made by commenter BobW.]

Nearly 2,000 years have passed.  So far as we know, Jesus has yet to return.  An article in today’s New York Times reminds us that even so, some Christians keep insisting that yes, Jesus is coming again — in fact, he might be here Any Day Now.   Here’s an excerpt:

WORD spread quickly in some conservative Christian circles when Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem from Arab forces in June 1967. This was it: Jesus was coming.

But Jesus did not return that day, and the world did not end with the culmination of that Arab-Israeli war.

Neither did it end in 1260, when Joachim of Fiore, an influential 12th-century Italian monk calculated it would, nor in February 1420, as predicted by the Taborites of Bohemia, nor in 1988, 40 years after the formation of Israel, nor after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But after last week's devastating earthquake in Pakistan, coming as it did after a succession of recent disasters, the apocalyptic speculation, bubbled up again with impressive fervor on many Christian blogs, in some pews and among some evangelical Christian leaders.

Combined with fears of a global pandemic of avian flu, the calamitous flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina and last year's tsunami in Asia, the predictions of the end of the world are to be expected, religious historians said.

After all, Christians have been predicting the end of history since the beginning of theirs.

Michael Luo, Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last, New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005 (paragraphing slightly edited for readability).

Why Do We Believe in God?

Noted British medical researcher Robert Winston’s forthcoming book, The Story of God, due out next month, sounds like it might be worth reading.  Judging by excerpts published in The Guardian this past Thursday, Lord Winston views religion as something that may be hard-wired into our genetic code.  If true, this should make us shake our heads in amazement, yet again, at God’s cleverness.  

Excerpts (with extra paragraphing and bullet points added):

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a "useful" genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified.

The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters.

The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation.

This is what we mean by "natural selection": adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes.

Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes?

Countryman: "Arrogant Evangelicals Must Repent"

Father Jake has posted an essay about the top-down authority of Primates in much of the rest of the Anglican Communion, in contrast the limited authority given to bishops, and even the Presiding Bishop, in the U.S. Episcopal Church.  The launching pad for his essay is the first chapter of Gays and the Future of Anglicanism: Responses to the Windsor Report, by L. William Countryman, a professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. 

Father Jake comments:

American Anglicans are not organized the same way as other parts of the Communion. Due to our particular history, we are not comfortable granting great authority to our bishops. We prefer to balance that authority with other clergy and lay people. We prefer to vote on things, rather than have pronouncements handed down by a prince of the church.

We Yankees have a deeply embedded distrust of the aristocracy.  We don't feel any need to apologize for our "locally adapted" historic episcopate. We think it works just fine, and are not interested in any attempts to change it.  

*  *  *

"Spooky Action at a Distance" -- WSJ

We have so much yet to learn about how God’s creation works.  And often, what we think we know about it turns out to be incomplete or even flat-out wrong.  A story in today’s Wall Street Journal illustrates these truisms once again.  Science columnist Sharon Begley reports ($) about “entanglement,” a quantum phenomenon once mocked by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” but which is increasingly supported by laboratory evidence:

The crystals in Paul Kwiat's physics lab have none of the sparkling facets and points that New Agers believe heal the body and "enhance the life force." But his chunks of beta-barium borate do something even more magical.

The crystals produce special particles of light that, no matter how far apart they ever travel, will always have an eerie connection to one another across the vastest reaches of time and space.

If a scientist makes a measurement on one particle, the other will "feel" it instantaneously.

Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance," and the very idea gave him fits.

But in the 70 years since the great man insisted that spooky action had to be wrong, and dreamed up thought experiments to disprove it, evidence for it has gotten only stronger.

Sharon Begley, “Even Scientists Marvel at ‘Spooky’ Behavior of Separated Objects,” WSJ, Oct. 14, 2005, at B1.  (Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)