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Sunday, April 20, 2014

Easter is the Most Ridiculous Christian Celebration

Today is Easter Sunday. Easter is the day when the Christian God was resurrected after being dead for 3 days. And the purpose? So, he can save the humanity for all time.

The idea of a God being born in a human male form is already absurd enough without the added stupidity of having that God dying on the cross only to be resurrected three days later! The fact that a billion Christians in the world subscribing to this belief easily only goes to show that there's absolute nothing that the religious people would not believe when absurd ideas are presented in a theological context.

Moving on, I was a little bit overjoyed reading this news article two weeks ago: If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?

I'm quoting essential part of the article, but you should read it entirely

When Bart Ehrman was a young Evangelical Christian, he wanted to know how God became a man, but now, as an agnostic and historian of early Christianity, he wants to know how a man became God.

During his lifetime, Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God, and ... none of his disciples had any inkling at all that he was God. ..

I think it's completely implausible that Matthew, Mark and Luke would not mention that Jesus called himself God if that's what he was declaring about himself. That would be a rather important point to make. This is not an unusual view amongst scholars; it's simply the view that the Gospel of John is providing a theological understanding of Jesus that is not what was historically accurate.

Right at the same time that Christians were calling Jesus "God" is exactly when Romans started calling their emperors "God." So these Christians were not doing this in a vacuum; they were actually doing it in a context. I don't think this could be an accident that this is a point at which the emperors are being called "God." So by calling Jesus "God," in fact, it was a competition between your God, the emperor, and our God, Jesus.

Christians had a dilemma as soon as they declared that Christ was God. If Christ is God and God the Father is God, doesn't that make two gods? And when you throw the Holy Spirit into the mix, doesn't that make three gods? So aren't Christians polytheists? Christians wanted to insist, no, they're monotheists. Well, if they're monotheists, how can all three be God?


I was struck in doing my research by the fact that the New Testament never indicates that people came to believe in the resurrection because of the empty tomb. This was a striking find because it's just commonly said that that's what led to the resurrection belief.

But if you think about it for a second, it makes sense that the empty tomb wouldn't make anybody believe. If you put somebody in a tomb and three days later you go back and the body's not in the tomb, your first thought isn't, "Oh, he's been exalted to heaven and made the son of God." Your first thought is, "Somebody stole the body." Or, "Somebody moved the body." Or, "Hey, I'm at the wrong tomb." You don't think he's been exalted to heaven. In the New Testament it's striking that in the Gospels the empty tomb leads to confusion but it doesn't lead to belief. What leads to belief is that some of the followers of Jesus have visions of him afterward.

If Jesus had not been declared God by his followers, his followers would've remained a sect within Judaism - a small Jewish sect, and if that was the case it would not have attracted a large number of gentiles. If they hadn't attracted a large number of gentiles, there wouldn't have been this steady rate of conversion over the first three centuries to Christianity; it would've been a small Jewish sect.

Reference

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/07/300246095/if-jesus-never-called-himself-god-how-did-he-become-one

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