Jesus' Accidental Moral Teachings

Intro:

I'm preparing a talk for an upcoming Skepticamp on being morally skeptical of the Biblical character Jesus as a good moral teacher and I'm trying to sort out a few issues before doing so.  This post is mostly about just one of those topics.  Did Jesus really recommend self mutilation in order to inhibit sin?

________________________________________

The vast majority of Christians have decided that Jesus isn't being literal in Matthew 5:29 when he says it is better to pluck out an eye or cut off an arm if it happens to be the linchpin to your sin leading you to hell (aside from some mentally ill people and monks who choose to castrate themselves), but the problem is it makes complete sense in light of Jesus' other teachings on investing completely in heaven and avoiding eternal damnation.  Is this news story about a teen who decides to sacrifice his right arm to an alligator "non-literal" because obviously no one would ever expect you to do such a thing?  Or does it make perfect sense in that context to save your life?





Obviously being killed by an alligator is infinitely worse than spending an eternity in hell. [/sarcasm]

A common excuse amongst Christians is that "obviously" it really isn't the body part that's the problem.  It's your desires.  True, but that doesn't mean your desire-scape doesn't change if you change your physical circumstances.  If there are not Doritos in the house, I won't eat any and I'll be too lazy to go get them from the store.  However if we have them already, I will eat them.  Pretty simple.  Physical changes impact my desires.  And there's no reason body parts are magically exempt from that type of equation.  Just think if Jesus spoke out about biting your nails!  Since Jesus made lust a thought crime you could get rid of your porn (in modern times anyway), but you can always get more which would always be a liability in Jesus' moral paradigm.  You can't always get more eyes if you pluck them out instead which would be a permanent solution to an addiction.  There's a reason religious people have castrated themselves rather than say, merely trying to think of something else other than sex.  

One may be encouraged by verses like Matthew 5:29 to try everything else first before going so extreme, but Jesus' moral paradigm would seem to dictate that, like the teen and the alligator, it can be better to rip off a limb of yours rather than suffer something even more horrible.  The logic is flawless.  And Jesus seems to expect prompt action about everything else, so he probably doesn't appreciate beating around the bush about it.  He says, "Go and sin no more," not, "just try harder next time and keep at it."  To my knowledge, you'll never find Jesus promoting a "works in progress" morality.  He seems to expect you to just stop sinning and be able to attain perfection (albeit with god magic) whether that is a reality based expectation or not.

Another common excuse is that other teachings in the Bible seem to be against damaging your body.  Even Old Testament prescriptions against self mutilation are not blanket statements of principle.  They are actually about not participating in the superstitions of their neighbors.  Castration and circumcision are self mutilation that obviously the Bible condones so mutilating your "holy temple" for a good cause (or rather fixing it up) is just fine with Jesus.

I noticed someone else online said that Jesus couldn't have meant to be taken seriously because merely plucking out your right eye or cutting off your right arm would still allow you to do the same sin with your left body parts.  But is this true?  People are often right eye and hand dominated.  Say you have a tendency to get in fights and murder people with a knife and you wouldn't be able to do the same thing without your good hand.  You might not be able to shoot a bow and arrow either if you have a particular eye dominance.  People aren't generally so ambidextrous so Jesus could be completely serious here.

Admittedly this entire issue may be a case of inadvertent moral coherence.  I'm reminded of what the Archmage in the cartoon Gargoyles sarcastically exclaimed when he realized he could not enter Avalon with his book of magic spells.  He said, "You mean we went to all that trouble to get the Grimorum and now I can't even take it in with me? What am I supposed to do? EAT IT? "  And his future self tells him, "You *are* learning!"  Obviously the Archmage didn't mean for his statement about eating a book to be taken literally, and yet it made perfect sense in the Gargoyles universe.   And he did eat the book.

Another example of accidental moral coherence of a different sort in the Bible is the evil of evangelism.  I do not think Jesus meant to teach that evangelism would be morally wrong, but it is difficult to come to a different conclusion based on his worldview.  Obviously Christians are commanded to evangelize (Matthew 28:19), but they are also commanded to love their neighbor (Matthew 22:39) and Paul even says in Romans 13:10 this means to do no harm to your neighbor.  Since Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:14 that most people will end up in hell, and he tells us that people will be punished less or even be innocent if they are ignorant and have excuses for not knowing any better (John 15:22), it logically follows that spreading the good news will ultimately hurt more people than it helps.  So why would you do it?  Any Christian that notices that the overwhelming majority of people they talk to about Jesus reject their message would have to be worried about this.  I know I was when I was as a Christian.  I know my Christian mother has expressed the same misgivings because the argument logically follows from what Jesus presents, but she remains a Christian nonetheless.  Of course the typical Christian response to this comes from the mouth of the murderer Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?"  If you've been commanded to love your neighbor then yes, yes, you are.  They would still be responsible for what they do, but you are responsible for what you do or don't do.  Knowingly doing more harm than good in the world has to be evil.

Outro:

So I'm thinking that it's a lose, lose situation for Jesus in my evaluation since I can dock him points in either event.  If he meant that you should chop off your limbs, then pretty much everyone is going to see a problem with that extremism.  And, if he didn't mean it, he'd have to have to explain why taking the hyperbole seriously just so happens to fit so perfectly in his worldview.

Any thoughts?

J. P. Holding Defends an Incoherent Incarnation.

Intro:

This post covers part of Christian internet apologist J. P. Holding's response to atheist Richard Carrier's chapter 9 in the book "Not the Impossible Faith" which is a refutation of Holding's original online essays which are no longer online.  This post will be part of The Richard Carrier Project.

The issues of this post are:

• Is (J. P. Holding's version of ) the Christian doctrine of Jesus' incarnation coherent?
• Did Jesus claim to be Yahweh incarnate by identifying himself with the Jewish concept of Wisdom?

And the short answers are probably not on both counts.

In a previous blog entry I wrote this:

This brings up the issue of the coherency of Christian concepts of the doctrine of the Trinity.  An entity with a separate will and a separate knowledge base (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 22:42; Luke 2:52; Matthew 24:36) is a different person.  Even if you choose to do the will of someone else, that doesn't make you them.  Even if they grant you superpowers and equal authority, that doesn't make you them either.  Being them is what makes you them.  What's the difference between the Holy Spirit influencing or informing Jesus at times and influencing other prophets?  I don't know.  I don't know what it means to say that Jesus is the same as Yahweh if all the components of not being that god are conceded to be as a separate human person.  It just sounds like a bunch of nonsense.

How does Holding deal with this?  He asserts:

Personhood is not incompatible with being an attribute of another person.

Um...yeah it is.  As long as it is admitted that Jesus and Yahweh are two persons, that's two different gods (Or rather, Yahweh is a god, and Jesus is just an honorary god since he clearly would have all human components and whatever divine ones must have been slapped on like what could be done to any human).  It simply doesn't mean anything to claim that Jesus and Yahweh are the same being when Jesus is clearly meant to have all the limitations and faculties of the human condition and an independent will.  The things that make each person their own person are the same things that make them two separate beings.

The closest thing I can think of to help a Christian position out here is the Borg from Star Trek and the problem there is that even if there is a hive mind with people who are attributes of that greater collective, those "people" are actually drones with no free will.  The character Jesus had the option of doing his own thing on more than one occasion in the gospels.  A hive mind of distinctive persons with their own will and knowledge bases is really incoherent gibberish.  It's just like normal people being on the internet.

In terms of other conceptual possibilities, a human brain couldn't even process an iota of Yahweh's infinitude of anything, and it would have nothing meaningful to contribute to it.    A facsimile of Yahweh's personality in human brain form would infinitely pale in comparison to the real thing ("I'll call him mini-Me!").  I'm sure some of the official Christian concepts rely on superstitious concepts of the mind/body problem that are not immediately evident.  The only way Jesus and Yahweh could be one being is if Jesus is just an empty avatar body for Yahweh's will, like he's playing a video game.  Obviously that's also heretical for most mainstream Christianities.

Holding skips a whole section of Carrier's chapter because of Carrier's supposed ignorance on an important concept of Holding's that he addresses elsewhere.

Holding equates Jesus with the Jewish concept of "Wisdom" and says:

In Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern thought, words were not merely sounds, or letters on a page; words were things that "had an independent existence and which actually did things."

So, apparently because of ancient superstitions about wisdom, all of the sudden this incarnation makes sense?  It's a common human mental bias to externalize things and treat it like a personal agent.  This sounds like a textbook case of that.  Hardly a sound foundation for a supernatural belief system.  [Note, Carrier actually responds to this Wisdom objection in his book on pages 249-250.]

The fact that ancient Jews accepted other semi-personified not-god god concepts doesn't make the concept coherent.  It just moves the incoherence back to that and explains that it had precedent (which supports a naturalistic account of Christianity).  The personification may have just been metaphorical.  In which case Jesus would be a new category of an actual personification of a divine trait.  It's hard to tell though with ancient sources, since it can be really hard to tell what they take seriously or what exactly their half-baked philosophy entails if they don't ever explicitly get into it.  And lots of philosophers in the history of philosophy say things they just don't mean.  Holding's reference to Philo's interpretation of Abraham's 3 divine visitors as an example of a Jew conceiving of a monotheistic trinity is again, just incoherent precedent.

So Holding dismisses some other ancient Christian ideas on Jesus' incarnation that actually make more sense (lol) and moves on to say this:

Christ's functional subordination (just as our words and speech are subordinate to ourselves) and his ontological equality (just as our words represent our authority and our essential nature) with the Father.

Our words may "represent" our authority and "essential nature," but that does not make our words either of those things.  That's like saying the word apple is an apple.

Holding casually glosses over the fact his references say Wisdom was created, since Jesus as a created being is a heretical view.  That's kind of funny.

Jesus' subtle appeals to Wisdom that Holding talks about seem to me to be like what any Jewish wise guy familiar with the traditions might say to themselves when they feel like people aren't listening to them.  Probably not a declaration of godhood.

Perhaps Holding could explain if Jesus is identifying with pre-Incarnate Wisdom how exactly he grows in knowledge and *wisdom* as a child (Luke 2:52)?

Also, since presumably Yahweh has more than just 2 attributes, by logical extension, Holding would have to accept the real possibility that he believes in much more than a trinity.  Also a heresy.  :D

The bottom line is that theologians are just going to have to shortstop logic all over the place and mystify this away since it doesn't really make sense.  The construction of the Nicene Creed seems to be more about Christian theologians (over time) backing themselves into corners because they don't like the implications of various views and merely swallowing what they found to be the most traditional elements of their religion even if those ideas differed from later versions they also sandwiched together.  Their view of their god is a happenstance historical Frankenstein concept glued together by implausible mystery and unsubstantiated authority.

Outro:

The last part of my response to the issues of chapter 9 will be, "J. P. Holding Defends a Special Incarnation" dealing with the likelihood of any first century Jews accepting the concept through the filter of how they understood what was possible in Judaism.

J. P. Holding defends an ignorant deity.

Intro:

Richard Carrier recently debated Christian apologist Douglas Jacoby over the divinity of Jesus and Carrier brought up Jesus' apparent ignorance of the benefits of washing one's hands.  Carrier used the point to show that Jesus was probably not god if he specifically denies that washing your hands has any important health benefits.  I happened to recall that the issue of Jesus' ignorance in general came up in the scuffle between Christian internet apologist J. P. Holding and Carrier in Carrier's book, "Not the Impossible Faith" in chapter 14 and so here it is.*

In chapter 14, Holding argues that Jesus' ignorance would have made him look bad and so this is supposed to strike of authenticity.  Holding appeals to the "criteria of embarrassment" touted by many scholars as an indicator of authentic Jesusness, but this appeals to what only seems like it should be embarrassing even if it isn't to that particular demographic of Christians in that particular cultural setting (and Carrier will get into a lot of detail in his forthcoming book, "Proving History" since the "criteria of embarrassment" has been popularly oversimplified and therefore misused).

As Carrier points out, Jesus isn't acting any different than the other gods in stories the common folk would be familiar with and so this probably wasn't embarrassing to them even if it should be.  How many TV and movie tropes make absolutely no sense, but we expect them to be that way anyway?  How much of our own culture is equally counter-intuitive and yet nonsensical sensibilities prevail anyway?  It's always amazing when Christian apologists seem to be insisting that no one ever accepts anything that doesn't make any sense, especially since as they should well know, sense-making is often in the eye of the beholder.

And so Carrier says:

[Holding] never proves [Jesus' ignorance] was a problem in the first hundred years of Christian preaching. Indeed, he doesn’t even establish that the statements in question were at all widely known even among Christians in the first century, much less an element of any conversion speech, even less an objection anyone raised until elite scholars took notice in the 2nd century.

Holding, with his usual level of internet maturity, says:

Playing the part of the spoiled playground child who dares you to jump over that building, Carrier complains of the lack of first century evidence for this being a problem, even as he admits that it was seen as a problem in the second century, as though ancient stupidity prevented this very obvious issue being raised 100 years earlier.

Maybe someone did raise the issue 100 years earlier and that's why they didn't convert.  How would we know unless we had evidence of it?  That's an important part of Carrier's point.

Further, if we are talking about particular ancient stupidity, even the Bible itself describes the disciples as some of the stupidest people on the planet (at least, according to Mark, where the disciples can't seem to figure out that Jesus can do magic tricks), so I don't think we need any skeptical prejudice in any event.

Aside from that, it makes sense that the average folk would have less problem (or no problem) with fallible deities and that the elite scholars (that we actually have on record) would.  Holding is the one who is supposed to be making the positive argument, but he's just making stuff up and Carrier is actually appealing to the evidence we do have.

However Holding exercises his all-powerful hairsplitting apologetic device:

Apparently Carrier cannot here distinguish between the pagan gods and the Jewish one. The issue here is that Jesus was ignorant in ways contrary to expectation for the deity he represented. In contrast, Zeus and the like were always depicted with human weaknesses and never failed to meet (much lower) expectations. The elite scholars critiqued the pagan gods for being unworthy -- not because they failed to meet an expectation according to their own described nature. [emphasis mine]

Holding presumes so much consistency like the earliest Christian target audiences were uber theology nerds.  Again, where is the evidence of such a strong expectation (and execution) of perfect ideological consistency?  In the long painful history of human beings just not thinking that hard about things (or just getting them wrong) and uncritically embracing traditional/cultural precedents and having blind spots, all of the sudden absolutely all of ancient Jewish culture turns on a dime and gets sufficiently picky for James Patrick Holding to have a point.  I'm sure. [/sarcasm]

So Holding has failed to make his point yet again.  But there's more.  Note what Carrier had said:

Those same elite scholars attacked all popular religions for exactly the same reasons: the precious myths the common people believed about their gods depicted those gods as exhibiting human weaknesses, including ignorance of things they should have known. Obviously, though this annoyed elite scholars, it was never any barrier to the success of widespread belief in these gods. So why should it have been a problem for Christians? [emphasis mine]

So...Holding wasn't really paying attention that hard apparently just like not every Jew is going to pay that much attention to theological consistency.

If we even had to go there this would require Carrier to provide some examples of elite scholars criticizing depictions of the pagan gods based on the appropriate god metric.  So I emailed Carrier and (after noting this wasn't even necessary) this is what he said:

...here are the examples of elite critique of divine ignorance, which exceeded the popular metrics for those gods (attacks on divine ignorance that *fit* the popular metrics are also available, e.g. the idea that one god should know how to sing and another not is *also* criticized as absurd, even though of course that is indeed what people believed, but Holding is, I presume, looking for a metric violation critique, and to that end...):

Lucretius argued that the gods don't even know we exist and wouldn't even know how to make people if they wanted to and therefore cannot have made us; they don't even know that lightning shatters and burns their own temples and statues (a claim of divine ignorance that was popularly denied).

This is the atomist critique of popular theology that is "denounced" in Plato, Laws 902a-b with the rhetorical question (which is supposed to be answered in the negative), "Shall we then assume, my worthy and excellent sir, that you assert that the gods are ignorant, and that it is through ignorance that they are neglectful when they ought to be showing care; or that they know indeed what is needful, yet act as the worst of men are said to do, who, though they know that other things are better to do than what they are doing, yet do them not, owing to their being somehow defeated by pleasures or pains?"

Lucian's Alexander the Quack Prophet attacks the god Glaucon for being ignorant by actually testing his oracle (James Randi style), where the god clearly couldn't divine the content of the submitted letter, and then noting how his oracles often go wrong (so clearly he couldn't predict the future). Yet he had countless avid believers (and continued to for centuries).

Lucian's Icaromenippus pokes fun at things like the fact that Zeus doesn't know what people on earth are saying about him (yet somehow knows there has been a decline in worship of him but plenty for the younger gods, a humorous contradiction, which *also* pokes fun at divine vanity). He even depicts Zeus using a kind of ancient telephone system (a series of special talking vats) to try and keep tabs on what's going on below. This was all funny precisely because popular conception held the gods to be ever present and aware of what people said about them, so the idea of them being confused about this and having to use magical machines to do it was an obvious joke.

Those are just the examples that come to mind. 

So Holding is just wrong again.  Oops.  No doubt Holding would make haste to delude us with more hair-splitting differences between these examples and the divine love of his life.

It's also a little weird that Holding doesn't tell us (anywhere I can find anyway) why Jesus' ignorance isn't a problem for Holding.  Otherwise we are left with the impression from this chapter that "It makes no sense, therefore it must be true!"

This brings up the issue of the coherency of Christian concepts of the doctrine of the Trinity.  An entity with a separate will and a separate knowledge base (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 22:42; Luke 2:52; Matthew 24:36) is a different person.  Even if you choose to do the will of someone else, that doesn't make you them.  Even if they grant you superpowers and equal authority, that doesn't make you them either.  Being them is what makes you them.  What's the difference between the Holy Spirit influencing or informing Jesus at times and influencing other prophets?  I don't know.  I don't know what it means to say that Jesus is the same as Yahweh if all the components of not being that god are conceded to be as a separate human person.  It just sounds like a bunch of nonsense.

Does Jesus deny his own divinity?

Carrier makes a few references to Jesus apparently denying being a god to show that perhaps the early Christians conceived of Jesus' divinity differently than later Christians.  At this Holding says:

It is also obvious that Carrier did not thoroughly read Malina and Rohrbaugh, for had he done so, he would have known that Mark 10:18 is not in the least a "denial" of divinity by Jesus.  As their Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (123) notes, in an agonistic (honor-shame) culture, a "compliment" like the rich young man's is actually a challenge and an attempt to put Jesus "on the spot" for they are an implicit accusation that one has been trying to rise above others. Jesus' only alternative was indeed to parry the compliment and redirect it to its appropriate subject (unless he wanted to reveal himself directly and fully, in which case, his claim would have been another challenge of honor to others!), thus showing himself honorable by diffusing any accusation that would arouse the envy of an opponent. Thus it is appropriate that Jesus parry the compliment in a way that does not specifically deny his membership in the Godhead (which, as noted, it does not). [emphasis mine]

I don't see Holding's argument.  He just asserts that some cultural convention is in play which doesn't seem to negate the element of it where Jesus denies he is the same as Yahweh.

Holding says:

Mark 13:32 contains no denial of being "God" at all and it is a mystery why Carrier thinks it does.

If Jesus is saying that Yahweh knows, but that he doesn't that implies he's not god.  This is not rocket science.

And so Holding continues:

If anything it is merely an example of the very problem my 14th point is stressing.

The point that Christianity gets to make no sense, but be true anyway?

Outro:

For the record, I agree with Holding that Carrier's points on omnipresence and Jesus as a suffering servant are not particularly compelling (but they're not needed).  Also, I agree with Carrier on Luke 8:43-48 that Jesus' "ignorant" question may just as well have been rhetorical.

I'll leave some of the other issues that came up in this back and forth for my own review of chapter 9.

***

*For those of you who don't know, most of the contents of Carrier's book were aimed at a collection of Holding's essays that are now only summarized in Holding's book, "The Impossible Faith."  I've been wanting to review the back and forth between them and post my final call on The Richard Carrier Project wiki.  Note, Holding's responses are no longer online.  Basically Holding makes a number of arguments in an attempt to show that since Christianity did all the wrong things culturally, yet succeeded anyway, it must have been because the evidence at the time showed that the religion was true.  Of course this amounts primarily (aside from a glaring argument from silence) to Holding gerrymandering all the cultural evidence as though Christianity were somehow always plunging headlong into the nexus of its fiercest opposition instead of playing the hand it was dealt to the elements of the culture that were obviously more receptive.  But you know, whatever.

Dr. Richard Carrier vs. Dr. Douglas Jacoby on the Divinity of Jesus

Intro:

This is one of Carrier's better debates. I think he did an excellent job. It was a long one though, clocking in at 3 hours, and there were over 23 questions asked from the audience by my count, mostly directed at Carrier. This debate is up there with his performances with Mike Licona and was interactive enough to tease out his views properly on the topic in relation to common Christian incredulity. It was also interesting listening to a Christian apologist gush all over the Jesus character in the NT while trying to maintain the pretenses of making an argument. On the other hand, it does seem that Carrier may want to work on his atheist "bedside manner," since most of his Christian audience seemed to spend most of their time being perpetually offended by their own continued misunderstandings of his positions.

The actual video should be available eventually, but here is the audio on youtube:

I think Carrier speaks well for himself for the most part, but I would like to throw my two cents in where some issues Jacoby brought up were left under-addressed and give some of my own commentary.  Be sure and check out the organizer of the event's review (Cameron English), "Debate review: Jacoby vs. Carrier" and also AIGBusted's review, "Re: Carrier-Jacoby Debate."

Jesus is so amazing, ZOMG!

• I had a project planned eons ago which was going to be a "Red Letters Commentary" on everything the Jesus character says in the gospels which would have been a great reference piece for this debate. Christians often enough profess to be amazed at Jesus' teachings and I wanted to have a series of posts I could point to that would show with thick doses of common sense that, "No, you've just been culturally primed to accept anything Jesus says regardless of actual merit." It would be a tantalizing opportunity to be able to read the words of an actual god incarnate, but I'm not about to pretend to be blown away if in fact I'm not. It takes too many excuses and arbitrary filters to make Jesus seem somewhat passable, and by that point you no longer have a positive case. Just a defensive one.
• There are many stupid or questionable things that Jesus says in the gospels. Just as one example, Jesus is accused of performing miracles by the power of Satan. Jesus asks rhetorically, "How can Satan drive out Satan?" It's called a ruse. Duh. If Satan wanted someone to buy evil teachings, he might have a fellow demon inhabit someone and then cast that demon friend out to "prove" that only not-Satan would teach these evil things. One would have to be completely oblivious to the con artists of the world to think what Jesus was saying is particularly clever (Carrier has similar things to say about this instance and Jesus as a not-so-great philosopher generally). Which leads us to...
• To perceive Jesus as sinless, one would have to beg the question on all the moral issues that he brings up. Advocating eternal punishments for finite crimes strikes many of us as pure evil. Telling people to hate their families, to cut off limbs and pluck out eyes, that lust is a thought crime, calling divorce and remarriage a sin, validating all the morality of the Old Testament, and advocating a number of other morally extreme teachings isn't exactly "blameless" in my book. It's rather demonic.
• As far as sinful actions and inactions go, Jesus condemns cities that he says would have repented if only he'd shown them magic tricks. He confronts people with information that they'll be judged more harshly for afterward, knowing they were going to reject it. He commands that all of his followers do similarly knowing that they will be making it worse for most people by telling them about a message that will condemn them given the overall trend will be to reject that message. Is this supposed to be all praiseworthy activity?
• Further, how in the world would we know Jesus wasn't thinking impure thoughts? How many historical figures' sins are actually necessarily recorded by history? How many religious figures are portrayed as more blameless than they actually were by their devoted followers? To see Jacoby ignore common sense and assert what is clearly just a reaction to doctrine and not the actual texts is baffling.
• As a challenge to Christian apologists who want us to believe there is something to Jesus' words beyond their own cognitive biases (or that skeptics are subject to their own anti-Jesus cognitive biases) I would propose that they fund a scientific study that would be a double blind sayings contest. Jesus' words would be removed from their Christian context and pit against many other sayings from many other philosophers and influential religious figures. Then you'd have lots of demographics of people rate how they feel about the passages to see who is really the most challenging, gracious, transforming, and really really remarkable of them all. If I'm not mistaken, something like this was done for the Koran, since it claims that its texts are extra special, but Muslims couldn't tell the passages apart from other passages. Muslims obviously inappropriately think the Koran is amazing, Mormons think the Book of Mormon is amazing, Taoists think the Tao Te Ching is amazing, and Evangelicals think the NT is amazing. As I've noted, I see many reasons to be unimpressed by the character Jesus in the gospels. If Evangelicals really want to sell us on something they want us to believe is something more than just a culturally primed arbitrary response to under-deserving texts (as is obvious in all these other cases), they'll need to do something like this scientific double blind sayings study to see if people are naturally impressed with Jesus on his actual merits. Otherwise, Jesus doesn't seem to have said anything any 1st century apocalyptic prophet couldn't have said on a good day.
• It is a bit curious that Jesus, according to Jacoby, is so infinite that he "can't be fit in a box" as well as so ignorant that we can't tell him from an ordinary human of the 1st century (who doesn't know local geography, cosmology, germ theory, or when exactly the end of the world will be). I'm still trying to figure out the "infinite" part of Jesus.
• If having some good comebacks that have been compiled after the fact by devoted writers is a good litmus test for divinity, I'm going to have to say that I'm now officially worshiping Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and ignoring that their writers had anything to do with it, of course).

Should we believe in the Bible with or without miracles?

• This is misdirection on Jacoby's part. The issue is that we live in a modern world where miracle claims are common and good evidence for them is not. In conjunction with that, people making stuff up, or believing things based on bad evidence is well evidenced. So the Bible should have miracles in addition to our modern world having miracles. For example, the Bible would be a lot more credible if only Christian evangelists could heal amputees in the modern world.

Jacoby argues the early church didn't feel free to make stuff up, because they had issues that the gospels didn't conveniently address.

• So...because it's not comprehensive they couldn't make up the painfully transparent polemics against unorthodox doctrines of the day? Might there not be other reasons why not every single issue isn't put into the mouth of Jesus? All it means is that they may not have felt completely at liberty to add whatever they wanted. It depends on the mechanisms of the broad category of "making stuff up." What if they were getting their content via dreams, visions, or feelings and subjectively it just so happened that not all issues were addressed through that filter? The psychology of mysticism is not necessarily an efficient process.
• Carrier, in email says: "We actually *don't know* what the big issues were in the latter half of the first century, and have only vague information about the early second century. It's also assuming a monolithic top-down church with a consistent agenda, when in fact it was hundreds of diverse communities and sects with different interests from each other, and the Gospels just represent four of those communities (just as other Gospels, e.g. Thomas, represent yet others; and for most, we have no Gospel at all to tell us what their concerns were). [...] the authors of the Gospels had specific goals they were trying to accomplish; they were not writing "church manuals" to address every issue whatever. They only cover the biggest and most common issues (e.g. dealing with intra-family tension, creating symbolic models for baptism, creating evidence of Jesus' divinity and resurrection), and in most cases are responding to each other rather than arguments outside the Gospels. Finally, no non-fundamentalist scholar agrees with Jacoby. They all concur that sayings are being fabricated (especially in John, to argue against and for specific issues John's authors deemed important; but also in Matthew, whom everyone recognizes is trying to write an anti-Mark, and his main goal is to support the Torah-observant Jewish Christianity, and has put words in Jesus' mouth to that effect; likewise Luke, who is inventing things to whitewash the conflict between Matthew and Mark). For example, Gregory Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy (1995) and David Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (1998) and Boris Repschinski, The Controversy Stories in the Gospel of Matthew: Their Redaction, Form and Relevance for the Relationship between the Matthean Community and Formative Judaism (2000), and Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts (2008). Those show how real scholars treat the evidence, including the fact that each author had specific agendas, to which other issues took a backseat for them, being not their specific interest or important enough to them to squeeze in."

We learn from Jacoby that the ancient Jews were monolithic in their beliefs as well as diverse in a whatever-serves-Christian apologetics kind of way.

• Or rather, it seems Jacoby is exercising a "no true Jew" fallacy where all the good and faithful Jews would never entertain unethical pagan beliefs (though the discussion wasn't about ethics) and would never be influenced by pagan culture. We'll have to call these Super Jews, since no one in the history of cultural influences has ever managed to be completely uninfluenced by surrounding culture.
• Or, just as there are fights over who is the true "orthodox" Christians today where each of these groups perceives themselves as being true to their roots in the only proper way, there's no reason to think that the ancient Jews wouldn't have had their own version of those kinds of disputes. Jews are just as human as the rest of us and their perception of pagan religious concepts may not have been an "all or nothing" assault on Judaism. Or at least, not every single self-respecting orthodox Jew would see those concepts in the same light. They might reason any number of things. Since they wouldn't likely perceive paganism as a naturalistic phenomena, they could have pulled something valuable from whatever spiritual insights that complimented or elucidated their understanding of Judaism.
• Far too often it seems Christians have conditioned themselves to not be able think in hypothetical "normal" terms on this issue even though we are all aware of how mundane human behavior plays out.  The skeptics aren't saying anything extraordinary about human behavior that isn't necessarily guided by some Holy Spirit keeping a target group on ideological track.  In the long history of disagreeing with each other, people diverge from whatever you think that official group is without it necessarily having to do with their own sins.

Were the disciples immediately ready to make stuff up about the resurrection?

• Jacoby admits that legends can spring up quickly (like overnight), but he says that this doesn't apply to Christian origins since Jesus' disciples were completely demoralized by his death. However, this argument simply trusts the source material too much. It is as though someone later writing the story isn’t going to try to dramatically punch it for posterity. They'd exaggerate the highs as well as the lows to try to tell what they feel would be a more emotionally credible tale.
• And especially if the disciples were making stuff up in order to have a flashier story that appeals to the masses to propel a more modest divine moral message they still really did believe in, they would have just fabricated the part about them not expecting a resurrection as well. It is possible to alter more than one thing as it turns out. The history of religion is peppered with plenty of pious fraud, I'm sure.

Why didn't the appearances of Jesus merely confirm that Jesus was dead like visions of people who have been killed normally do?

• Um...maybe because Jesus' body was accidentally misplaced and so the tomb was found empty leaving a strong impression on superstitious minds that subconsciously wanted to find a way to repent of their cowardice and redeem themselves? Maybe because Jesus was delusional, really thought he was divine, and had already planted the suggestion that he was really going to rise? Honestly, that all visions are the same and have the same monolithic impact on every group of people ever is just stupid.

Is Carrier exercising "parallelomania?" to explain away the uniqueness of Jesus?

• This is the stock apologetic response to any application of “parallels” regardless of what is actually argued. "I’m subjectively not convinced, therefore you must be seeing parallels everywhere they aren’t.” "Meanwhile, pay no attention to all the ridiculously biased things I’ve said propping up Jesus." I get really tired of this accusation like just mining all the differences somehow negates all the obvious similarities. You have Christians explaining away all the parallels just as much as you have them implausibly accommodating them as though Yahweh meant to do that. It doesn't have to be precisely Star Wars or the Matrix to show the obvious impact on so many movies after each of them was made.

Carrier may need to work on his atheist "bedside manner."

• Carrier could profit from prepping his audience and padding his usage of the term "schizotypal." It was very clear from the reactions of Jacoby and the predominantly Christian audience throughout the debate that they all felt like Carrier was slandering them with something like "you are all crazy." Of course, that's not what Carrier ever said (and this actually reflects a form of ableism on the part of the Christians), he wasn't even referring to modern Christians, and he clarified more than sufficiently several times, but that didn't stop the many carred train of Christian offense. The fact is we all live in a world where there are actually schizotypal cults and inferring that an ancient religion may have been started by one (based on the kinds of things they say they were doing) is meant to be a description of reality. Not an insult.
• Also Carrier's very clinical response to the miracle claim of the boy who was dragged by a truck and torn up quite a bit and then was apparently okay a week later seemed to strike people in the audience and Jacoby as very cold and insensitive. Obviously Carrier was just being obvious and telling them how he'd investigate. It could have used some empathetic padding though.
• There also seems to be that collective Christian audience emotion that builds up in Carrier debates that could be diffused ahead of time that centers around anything Carrier says about his own salvation and willingness to believe on the kind of evidence he thinks is reasonable. It's quite humorous and predictable (and demonstrated by relief based cheers and applause when Carrier's opponent says something against it that they've been dying to hear), but it seems like perhaps he could find a way to pop that bubble ahead of time so that Christians aren't fixating on it while he's talking about other things.

What about Jacoby's accusation of Carrier's skeptical prejudice against the early Christian visions and revelations?

• If credulity is a virtue, then skepticism must be a prejudice, right? Rather than continuing to call Carrier "prejudiced" (3 times in the debate, I think), it would have been more appropriate for Jacoby to reiterate his own arguments that were meant to show that these visions were likely the real deal.
• I would have said this to Jacoby up front: The visions in the NT, from our epistemic vantage point, are indistinguishable from arbitrary hallucinations mistaken as the real thing that are ubiquitous in religion and humanity in general and I will be speaking as though this is a given, based on our modern understanding of what we know is possible, until sufficient evidence is presented that it was more than that. Carrier did indeed explain this, but he also kept using definitive language that the Christians were clearly fixating on as though his word use was supposed to be his argument rather than the actual argument he presented more than once.

Is Carrier a hypocrite for not diagnosing himself as delusional for having an encounter with a demon?

• This is the same ableism stuff as pointed out above as though you are a bad person for having a hallucination. This is about explanatory power, not insults! And "schizotypal" is not an insult!
• As I pointed out to Christian apologist J. P. Holding (and apologist Steve Hays made the same accusation of anti-supernatural bias in "This Joyful Eastertide"), in my post "Leaning Tower of Preterism" the Christian worldview does not tell you what is just a sleep paralysis hallucination and what is the real deal. As a Christian I was open to the demonic interpretation of my vicious sleep paralysis hallucinations that threw me around the room and crushed me in mid-air, and threw me back down into my bed. But I also knew it could just be a powerful dream (it's not like there were bruises when I woke up). Maybe Jacoby, Holding, and Hays have a secret decoder ring for that kind of thing, but Carrier and I do not. Even Jacoby admitted at one point that Christians can be at times a bit superstitious.

Jacoby says that Carrier's philosophy is too narrow-minded to come to the correct conclusions and that Christianity is about relationship, not science.

• The problem is that the relationship is also about truth claims that are difficult to appraise with the standards of evidence typical of believers of many different religions and sects and denominations in those religions. If I want to know that my special religious feelings actually mean what I think they mean, I have to be honest about everyone else's religious feelings as well and not exercise special pleading about my own. I'd need better evidence and that takes us into the world of all the sophisticated forms of argument and evidence that takes place between believers and other believers as well as non-believers. This isn't just to convince others since you'd necessarily need to know the answer to these questions yourself.
• Also, if I want to know that my prayers are being answered rather than me being deceived by coincidence, confirmation bias, and having a horrible statistics processing brain, I have to turn to something like the scientific studies which are aimed at greatly reducing those kinds of factors. For Christians to assert that they don't need that kind of rigor is to be intellectually irresponsible.
• I do agree though that humans shouldn't have to be masters of the epistemic universe in order to have reasonable beliefs about gods, however, it is very clear from the mass confusion of the religious world that such levels of rigor are required. When you have two or more mutually exclusive arbitrary explanations for something, you have to raise your standards and look for better evidence and argument to discern which is correct. The fact humans are put in this position actually argues against Christianity as it is quite an inhumane predicament for a shepherding god to put all of us in.

Q and A

Though these are numbered by the question, I may be commenting on any random thing said during that particular period.

Question 1:

Is Mr. Sermon-on-the-Mount really coming back for revenge on Judgment Day?

• Um...yes, this is the Jesus-is-a-nice-guy myth for Christians and atheists who have only read the Sermon on the Mount and neglected everything else the guy supposedly said. The turning the other cheek and forgiving your neighbor stuff is all good fun in this life, but Judgment day is supposed to be about catching up on all the justice that fell through the cracks. If sending the bad people to eternal suffering isn't revenge, I'd hate to see what Jesus thinks revenge would look like. Two eternities perhaps? Carrier had no reason to back down on his comments.

Question 2:

David Fitzgerald! Moving on...

Question 3: Does Jesus not know about germs when he says washing your hands doesn't matter?

• Jacoby insists that the context is a religious one and hence Jesus is just making a religious argument. However the fact that Jesus thinks there's only a religious issue at stake with washing hands is the very same problem. Even washing your hands with just water is better than doing nothing.
• Religious and disease related cleanliness laws seem to be freely conflated on any other occasion so the omission is a bit glaring.
• As my good friend Daniel Calvert once pointed out a long time ago, why doesn't the OT have the simple phrase, "Boil drinking water," randomly listed in Leviticus between stoning gay people and banning multi-fabrics? Sanitation is like a huge problem in the world today and always has been.
• Apologists will exploit any accidental religious prescription that seems to have some benefit as though this shows Yahweh knows things the Jews don't, but this episode clearly pops that bubble for that perspective in the very least.
• It's interesting that Jacoby seems perfectly okay with this being yet another example of Jesus' human limitations. Normally when Jesus is limited, one could argue that knowing the details of cosmology (like that the earth isn't flat) doesn't really impact anyone, but this example here is an instance where it actually does matter quite a bit.
• Also, this:

Question 5:

Near the end, Jacoby goes off on a "science can't prove science is valid" tangent as though science isn't ultimately based on human experience and as though that means that any old axiom is legit just because someone calls it an axiom. I covered a lot of these issues extensively in my review of chapter 2 and chapter 4 of "The Christian Delusion." I'm just glad Jacoby didn't derail the entire debate with them as is the custom of other apologists.

Question 7:

Jacoby wants to say there's not enough evidence to prove cultural diffusion is responsible for a lot of the Christian memes, though cultural diffusion is an ordinary claim about human ideas and requires minimal evidence which was actually provided. On the other hand, demonstrating that Jesus was god and had magic powers requires a great deal of evidence. Me thinks Jacoby is exercising dishonest epistemic scales.

Question 8:

Jacoby says that the spiritual world is real, that there is "true evil" in the world, and that demons are real. Maybe he could have like proved that or something to support his case that Jesus isn't just the god of Christian mythology?

Question 9:

Jacoby claims that apocalyptic literature (like Jesus' claim that angels would gather souls from all over the world for Judgement day before his current generation passes away and obviously nothing like this happened at the destruction of Jerusalem) shouldn't be taken any more literally than the stars falling from the sky should be taken literally. Of course, that begs the question of whether the authors of the Bible thought the stars were just little lights pasted up on the hard dome on top of a flat earth. See my series on the primitive cosmology of the Bible.

Question 12: lulz, I love it how this lady forgives Carrier for insulting her. Carrier should forgive her for her lack of comprehension.

Question 15: I'm pretty sure this woman said something about "Bees!" (in relation to accusations of hallucinations and 1970's acid trips).

And then she exercises the success fallacy as though she is completely oblivious to every other long term successful religious movement currently alive in the world. **facepalm**

Question 17: I disagree with Carrier’s answer to questioner 17 a little bit in that it would be feasible for a creator god to design us with the need for a divine relational purpose that we could approve of upon hearing it. Obviously our ability to assign meaning is independent of that in actuality. Lots of people are assigning meaning to their lives successfully in ways that mainstream Christianity would not consider divinely approved in a direct sense. So in reality there’s compatibility with hypothetical divine purpose, but it's obviously not a necessity.

Question 18: This is actually the same as question 5 on the criteria for sorting hallucination from genuine vision. Christians are so good at having convenient lapses of imagination when it comes to distinguishing good evidence of the supernatural from bad evidence of it. Compare the levels of evidence here between this clip of That Mitchell and Webb Look where the joke is that alternative medicine has been defined into reality every hilarious step of the way and this cancelled pilot of Ronald Moore’s 17th Precinct where real pagan magic has been incorporated into everyday life because it's obviously real. Get it? Got it? Good.

Question 20: I don't know what Bible Jacoby is reading when he says that compared to other obvious mythology the gospels are giving us "just the facts." To me the gospels read like 1st century Jewish comic books.

Question 21: We have our token atheist skeptic who rolls out some random Bible contradictions. Jacoby, amazingly, responds to each one without even as much disgust as I would have had. I could disagree with his answers, but they are a bit off topic.

Closing statements:

Carrier closes with basically Loftus' outsider test for faith that's an appeal to consistent standards of evidence, which is good.

Jacoby says several things, but I only want to comment on one of them.

• In order to justify such weak standards of evidence for establishing that his god is communicating to us all, Jacoby says that sometimes his wife gives him a subtle cue that he just has to figure out and that this is just the way relationships are. But what’s the number one principle of good relationships? Good, solid communication, right? It's not primarily carried on the back of secretive, hinty, mystical nonsense. The only reason the subtle stuff works in real life is because the overt stuff has been well established in those relationships. And if the overt stuff had been well established in the god relationship, we wouldn't even have Jacoby trying to justify what he thinks is the subtle stuff would we?

Outro:

So that's it. It was an interesting and long debate, with several laugh out loud moments for me at the Christian expense. I'm sure Carrier will perfect his game further for future engagements.

Ben