Week 2: Why did Jesus die?

Without Luke or Mark present in the discussion it was a challenge to hold myself back, but here’s how it went…

(Warning, this will be a little less laid back than my previous entry)

Part 1: The video

Once again we were presented a talk by Nicky Gumbel, assuming the last one was supposed to have proven that Jesus existed (spoiler: it didn’t), this talk was to give the reason he died and show how loving God was in ‘sacrificing’ himself/his son for us (wasn’t much of a sacrifice since he, Jesus, got to go to heaven and be worshipped forever).

He starts with the usual stuff, we are all sinners, Romans 3:23 (for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,) and John 3:16 etc. All the things you’ve probably heard before. He then listed a few things considered sinful; murder, theft, lying etc. he then says that thinking of someone in anger is equal to murdering them and that committing the smallest sin is equal to committing them all (he used the analogy that making scrambled eggs with 15 good eggs and 1 bad egg would ruin the whole thing) which I personally found horrendous (more on this in the discussions). It honestly felt like listening to Ray Comfort’s “are you a good person”. He stated that the 10 commandments were a good moral guide (doesn’t say which set and even in the set he probably means the first 4 are God being jealous and egocentric) my only thought was should you be observing the feast of the unleavened bread?

A quick anecdote about a Judge paying the fine he just ordered his old friend to pay and how this is compared to Jesus. Another about how when we see something happen we cry out for justice to be done but if we do that ourselves we will always justify it.

Nicky then states that the fact evil occurs is one of the main problems of Christianity yet does not even try to respond to the problem of evil, for those who don’t know the problem of evil goes like this:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent

Is God able to prevent evil, but not willing? Then he is malevolent

Is God able and willing to prevent evil? Then why does evil occur?

Is God neither willing nor able? Then why call him God?
This applies to the Christian and other monotheistic views of God (Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, and Omnipresent).

Nicky states that even if you think you are good compared to someone else God is perfect, if we use the analogy of height, with the least moral person at the bottom and most at the top, Nicky said that the most moral person would be at the ceiling and God would be in the sky, so when God is looking down all humans look equal (again more on this in discussions). Nicky finished by saying Jesus is perfect, I don’t personally think chasing people with whips is perfect but each to their own (ironic saying each to their own when sat here arguing with them isn’t it? The Alpha Course is aimed at Christians and non-believers though).

He finishes with an anecdote about a man who was addicted to alcohol; he gave his life to Jesus and beat his addiction (failing to note we have these stories for pretty much all religions and even aliens).

There is mention of a cheque with no name on it, from Jesus and the price on it was something like “forgiveness for all your sins” and all you have to do is accept it and write your name to get into heaven.

No mention of Hell, at all. Which is a shame because I couldn’t use the Mafia Boss analogy (one of my favourites) so I will put it here:

A mafia boss walks into a store, he says to the owner “nice store you have here, it would be a shame if it burned down. I tell you what, give me £500 and I won’t burn it down”.

God is basically saying “nice life you have here, shame if you have to burn in hell forever. I tell you what, worship my son and I won’t send you to hell”.

(I know all you Christians are thinking “God doesn’t send you to hell you send yourselves there” just like you burn down your own store by not paying)

But that’s not entirely fair is it?

What’s actually happening is a man who says he works for the mafia is asking for money, you can’t even be sure if the mafia boss is real or that he would burn your store down if he was, same with God. It can be said it is better to worship/pay just in case; this is Pascal’s wager and can be applied to any religion. If it’s better to do things based on what could happen you would have to be a member of every religion ‘just in case’.

Part 2: Discussion

Mary again leads our group off into a room to have a discussion. Mark has gone off to Beta and Luke is no-where to be seen so I was understandably cautious.

I managed to get the first question in and asked

“Do you think it is moral for lying to be considered equal to murder, since committing the least sin is considered equal to committing all of them?”

Someone else added to this saying “Should a liar be considered equal to Hitler? And if Hitler repented…”

I had to clarify that Hitler was indeed Christian (none of them used the ‘No True Scotsman’ fortunately) this clearly shocked them.

The anecdote about the Judge is mentioned,

I ask if it is moral for me to be punished for someone else’s crimes. For example if someone causes £20,000 of damage and they can’t pay it, is it ok for me to pay it for them. Surprisingly a lot of people say “yes but only if you wanted to pay it”.

I then ask is it ok for me to serve someone else’s Jail time if I wanted to? The answer is no.

I ask Mary if we get into heaven through faith or works, she dodges the question by asking what the group think, with varied answers although it was stated either way “Hitler was definitely in Hell”. I had an answer prepared for both:

If works then belief in God/Jesus is irrelevant and all that matters is being a good person.
If faith then you can do literally anything and as long as you ‘truly repent’ you can get into heaven.

We then talk about how and why people sin, I ask “if we do not sin did Jesus die for nothing?” I get answered with everybody sins (in honesty this was the answer I was looking for and used to my advantage later). I jokingly ask whether we should go out and sin to make Jesus's death more worthwhile.

Questioning if anyone has read 1984, thankfully a few had, I consider the belief that thinking of someone in anger is equal to murdering them and, in a very Hitchens kind of way, state that “This is the very definition of thought crime”. I receive no response to this.

The group considers the prospect of thought crime for quite a while, I state how thoughts do not harm someone but actions based on those thoughts do. Someone pipes up with “If you are angry at someone you will take that anger inward, you will become angry at yourself, you will get depressed and harm yourself”. One of the longest slippery slopes I have ever heard my only answer was to consider finding a way to manage anger and whether anger can be justified.

We are signalled that time is running out so I finish with “Since you believe we all sin, and that God created us, is it unfair to say that we are created sick and commanded to be well?”

The question remained unanswered.

Mary brings out some of the cheques Gumbel mentioned and offers everyone a cheque they all take one but I respectfully declined, thinking back it would have made a decent souvenir.

As I finish I can predict some criticisms:

You didn’t mention Hell, Morality, and the Euthyphro Dilemma etc.

How putting the tree in Eden was like putting a loaded gun in a baby’s crib.

How immoral original sin is.

Admittedly I could have mentioned a lot of things but I had to save something for next week…

Although I am a humanist, having been invited to join in on an Alpha Course at my local church I felt it would be rude to simply say no without at least showing my face. So here goes:
(note that all names used, except those of historians, are pseudonyms)


Week 1 (technically week 2 but I missed the 1st): “Who is Jesus?”
At first impressions they all seemed like a lovely bunch of people and they are; literally no bad things to say about them.
Thankfully Mark, my Christian friend who I had agreed with that it was a bad idea to out me as a non-believer to early, was the only person there who knew I was not a believer, for now anyway. Mark’s friends Luke, Eve and I were having a bit of a joke around, such a nice atmosphere I almost forgot where I was until we were called to watch the video.


Part 1, Intro Video


I was expecting something good, hoping to learn something new at least. Yet, since I had actually done my research on the historicity of Jesus, I was woefully disappointed. It was a talk given by Nicky Gumbel, a skilled speaker and founder of the alpha course, his skill at speaking did not translate to history however. It wasn’t long before the well-known forgery in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews was being used as evidence of the divinity of Jesus. A brief mentioning of Tacitus and Suetonius, failing to mention that they were writing in the 2nd Century CE (I refer to CE now since the booklet I was handed said that AD and BC were evidence of Jesus’s divinity) and Suetonius only mentioned Chrestus, which was a common Greek name meaning good, not Jesus by name and Tacitus only repeats the then belief of Christians claiming no knowledge of Jesus’s existence.
We are then led through a painful amount of bible verses and even the empty tomb argument for Jesus’s existence. He then brings up the Lewis trilemma (Liar, Lunatic or Lord) and uses it as justification of Jesus’s existence and divinity, the trilemma itself assumes that Jesus existed and performed miracles; so in essence is a useless argument (more on this later). 
Nicky tells an anecdote of how he used to be an Atheist and when reading the New Testament he was instantly converted (obviously he didn’t read the horrendous things in the Old Testament). He rants about how all the nice things Jesus said (missing out the selling everything and relying on God to provide everything, slavery and chasing people around with whips) prove he was God. We then hear about Jesus’s resurrection, which apparently 500 people saw yet none of them wrote about it, and how Christianity is a relationship with Christ. The personal experiences people have with Christ (none cited however) being used as proof of his existence. The video draws to a close and Nicky asserts that all historians accept Jesus’s existence (which is probably news to most historians I have met) and divinity, with that the video ends.

Part 2, Discussion
After singing Amazing Grace, the first few lines I still find abhorrent, we are split into groups. I am grouped with Mark, Luke and a few others around my age. The group is being led by a young student, Mary, who initially invited me to this after seeing an argument between me and my course mate (ironically during this argument I had already responded to the claims about Tacitus, Josephus and Suetonius). Mary started off by asking what I thought was a great question in “If you could ask God anything, and be guaranteed an honest answer, what would you ask?” The first thing that popped into my head was “Why did you go to great lengths to conceal yourself?” but I thought it best to wait for other questions first. The suggestions from the group (Why did he make everything, why does he provide some with evidence but not others) were great but my personal favourite was “Why did God create things the way they are if he knew what was going to happen?” For a second I actually though there was another non-believer in the room so I thought now would be a good time to ask mine, it received mixed reactions but the atmosphere was still nice, it would not remain this way.


Mary’s first question was “Based on the video do you think there is enough evidence to believe Jesus existed?”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“Yes”
“No”
At this point with everyone looking at me, Mary asked me why, thankfully I had done my research and responded with what I thought to be a bulletproof argument: “The Josephus testimonial is a known forgery…Tacitus and Suetonius were not contemporaneous…The Lewis trilemma presumes his existence and can be equally applied to any religious figure.” Not wanting to mention the problems with the bible too soon as not to offend, although this came back to bite me in the ass. Mark explained that we have non-contemporary accounts of WW2 and we believe them and assuming 100% accuracy of the bible we should believe the stories about Jesus. I replied with the contemporary accounts, archaeological finds and enlistment details of soldiers etc. we have of world war 2 we can confirm it actually happened. Inevitably Julius Caesar was mentioned, I used the example that we had other contemporary accounts of him, things he said, did, coins with his face on, and sculptures of him.
Luke said there would be no coins with Jesus’s face on since he was a minor figure, my internal monologue screaming at me “He was seen by 500 people, raised himself and others from the dead, you mean to tell me nobody wrote about the zombie invasion of Jerusalem?” Needless to say I kept this thought to myself.


We discussed whether Jesus’s teachings were good and whether that was justification enough to believe he was God, it was mentioned that Jesus spoke of himself whereas other religious figures spoke of their Gods only and that Jesus was only human. I made a comparison between Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha and said that while I accepted that there was probably a real human who Jesus was based upon, there is insufficient evidence to warrant a belief that he was God. (At this point every time a question was asked people would wait for what I had to say, yet Mark’s presence kind of held me back, he had once referred to me as “Making Dawkins look moderate”)


One of the other members said that “Believing Jesus existed is the biggest leap, you have already made it, it only takes a little faith to believe he is God” I just thought of Apollonius of Tyana but before I could bring him up Luke made a remark that we take it on faith that coins contain gold, I replied that we can melt them down and test for gold, that the level of evidence should be different based on the claim and that their faith was equal to a Muslim’s faith in Allah. With Carl Sagan stuck firmly in my head I recited “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. I then asked if people believe me when I say there is a £1 coin in my pocket they answered yes; going all Sagan again I asked if they believed there was a “Dragon in my Garage”. This got a few laughs at least. It was stated that if people believe there is something and it is proven later they were right, Mark made a reference to the Library of Alexandria and how many books have been destroyed that could have contained evidence for Jesus’s divinity.


The final sentence I managed to get in was “Do you think we should believe something without evidence, based entirely on the chance some could be found?” There was silence for a moment, this seemed to have got a few people thinking, until one member said “I believe it because it makes me feel good, and if that doesn’t harm others it shouldn’t matter”. The words Condoms, Crusade, Homophobia, and Slavery etc. were racing through my head at this point, but this was all erased by what another member said:
“I know because I have felt God, I have heard him talking to me and guiding me”
The internal monologue fired up again with “Muslims say the same thing with Allah, Hindus with…”
At this point we were signalled that time was running out and I felt it would have been rude of me to say that so I didn’t.
As we left I shook hands with Mary and thanked her for the invite, she asked if I would be there next week, avoiding the question I said it depends on how busy I am, I’m not busy at all on those nights and I did really enjoy it. Even if I didn’t happen to agree with them they were all really nice people to be around, so I may just be there next week.