Foreword, March 03, 2016
Like the Catholic Pope Francis (2015) I believe there are good people who are atheists (just as there are good people who belong to some religious sect or other). Religious belief alone is not a gateway to goodness or morality.
Indeed, a religious person does good deeds out of hope for reward in heaven or fear of God’s punishment (for not doing that deed); either way, his or her motive is selfish. In contrast, an atheist does a good deed simply because he feels it is the right thing to do.
July 30, 2017 RELIGION AS PURE HOPIUM
Most Americans believe that a man walked on water, rose from the grave 3 days after his death, and levitated himself to the sky, there to dwell forever. At the same time, some Americans doubt that humans walked on the moon!!! There was never a better case of delusion than that! I do not believe any of that hokum.
I am an Atheist
I have been an atheist since the mid-1960s when I finished from my Catholic, boarding, high school—where Irish priests kept close guard over us 24/7. But it was not their over-eager vigilance that turned me off religious belief; it was just that I found the message of religion to be total twaddle. Christianity, especially, is an unoriginal, hodge-podge mix of ancient fairy tales literally taken from Greek, Persian, and even older cosmologies. Those myths had brewed in the minds of ignorant people who knew nothing beyond their five senses and could ONLY speculate about such things. These days we know better: much, much better.
What an Atheist is NOT
There’s a general misconception about what atheism means or says. An enlightened atheist does not claim “There is no god.” Such a flat claim would, like religion itself, be a mere belief because it cannot be proved: one cannot prove that a thing does not exist. An atheist only says “There is no objective evidence for the existence of any god.” The evidence that the Christian church used to adduce was miracles; but since science is increasingly able to debunk miracle claims and sky visions of “saints,” such once-touted supernatural events have ceased to occur in our lives.
Historicity of Jesus Christ
A most astonishing fact, to me, is that contemporary historians mentioned not a word about Jesus! While Mohammed of Islam is known to be an actual, historic figure (which does not mean that his message was meritorious), the historical fact of a Jesus Christ is in great doubt.
During the decades in which Jesus was supposed to have lived, Judea was a turbulent part of the Roman Empire. Great world events were occurring then, including in Judea—a center of constant revolt against Rome. Such events were reported by scholarly historians, like the Plinys, Tacitus, Josephus, etc. But those scholars never breathed a word about any doings of Jesus Christ, a man claimed to have blazed a trail about Judea, doing supernatural deeds:
- changing water into wine,
- walking on water,
- raising people from the dead,
- then himself dying and rising from the dead!
For example, there were:
- Pliny the Elder who witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in CE 79 and died by suffocation in the fumes of that eruption;
- His nephew, Pliny the Younger, who chronicled the destruction of Pompeii/Herculaneum by that eruption;
- Titus Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who was a Roman citizen (born Yosef ben Matityahu) and who wrote copiously about Jewish affairs in the decades following the putative birth of Jesus Christ. He chronicled the mass suicide, in CE 72, of the Jews defending the citadel of Masada when they were besieged by the Roman army.
One must concede that Josephus mentioned a Jesus twice: once as “the brother of James,” and then in saying that his followers “worshiped him as a god” (just as ancient Persians, Greeks, and Romans did worship some of their leaders as gods). And Pliny the Younger, who was governor of Bithynia & Pontus (on the Black Sea shores of today’s Turkey) also commented on the Christians; he dismissed them as harmless but eccentric, indulging in “excessive superstition.”
If Jesus was raising anybody from the dead or walking on water, Josephus and Pliny would surely have reported it!!!
All that history holds of a Jesus Christ was written by the same followers of his who “worshiped him as a god,” starting with the writers of the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then their words became “holy writ.”